Re: Installing Windows binaries

[Hadley Wickham]

Hi Joona,

Two options:

1) install.packages(pathtofile, repos = NULL)

2) We could add a flag function to devtools so you could do something like:

install(built("path/to/built/package"))

We've started along that road with inst() for working with installed
packages, and devtest() for test packages included with devtools, but
doing it right would require quite a lot of (probably worthwhile)
changes to devtools. We'd have to make the current package management
functions generics and then dispatch on the package type.

Hadley

On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 7:02 AM, Joona Lehtomäki
<joona.l...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Is there currently any way of installing pre-built Windows binaries with
> devtools without the need of installing RTools? The reason for this is to
> avoid additional installations that require admin rights on the user side.
>
> I've been using the build_win function to create the binaries and would like
> do something like install_url(url_to_zip, binary=TRUE). install(pkg) in
> devtools handles the dependencies as well, but there seems to be no way of
> avoiding the build() stage which isn't needed when using pre-built binaries.
> It perfectly possible to do R CMD INSTALL pkg.zip but as far I can tell
> there is no way of installing dependencies when working with a local
> archive.
>
> Cheers and sorry if I've missed something obvious.



--
Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair
Department of Statistics / Rice University
http://had.co.nz/

[Joona Lehtomäki]

Hi Hadley,

Thanks for the quick response.

1) install.packages(pathtofile, repos = NULL)

This indeed seems to be the most straight forward solution right now although it won't install the dependencies. Since we don't to many of them I'm sticking to a separate, simple dependency installation script. 

 

2) We could add a flag function to devtools so you could do something like:

   install(built("path/to/built/package")) 

We've started along that road with inst() for working with installed
packages, and devtest() for test packages included with devtools, but
doing it right would require quite a lot of (probably worthwhile)
changes to devtools.  We'd have to make the current package management
functions generics and then dispatch on the package type.

For now I think solution no. 1 is satisfactory for us, but maybe these kind of changes would indeed be worthwhile. Thanks again for sharing, and I'll keep following the latest developments.

Joona