Preparation

Martin Morgan, Hervé Pagès

Contents

1 Preparation

1.1 (Recommended but optional) Build R from Source

• It will be helpful, but not required, to have your own R, built from source ‘by hand’. We’ll use it when learning about R’s memory managment, and when debugging C code.

SVN

• Use SVN to check out the ‘R-3-4-branch’ source code. The specific location is not so important, but I like to have a ‘src’ and ‘bin’ user directory. This requires that subversion is installed.

  mkdir -p ~/src/ && cd ~/src
  svn co https://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-3-4-branch

Linux

• Requires admin rights if the ‘devel’ version of system libraries need to be installed.

• (an easy cheat – get dependencies by using your package manager to install a ‘dev’ version of current R, e.g., sudo apt-get install r-base-dev). But then do the svn stuff anyway.

• I do an SVN checkout into a ‘source’ directory, then build in a ‘bin’ directory. I build without optimization (for easy debugging)

  mkdir -p ~/src/ && cd ~/src
  svn co https://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-3-4-branch
  R-3-4-branch/tools/rsync-recommended
  mkdir -p ~/bin/R-3-4-branch
  cd ~/bin/R-3-4-branch
  CFLAGS="-g -O0" CXXFLAGS="-g -O0" ~/src/R-3-4-branch/configure \
      --enable-R-shlib --enable-memory-profiling
  make -j

• Use the built version in-place (no need to install) ~/bin/R-3-4-branch/bin/R

Mac (requires admin rights)

• Complete instructions for building from source.

Windows

• Complete instructions for building from source.
• Avoid spaces in file paths.
• Install svn command-line client.
• Open a PowerShell or cmd shell. Check out the R-3-4-0-branch of svn, as above.
• Install Rtools; install everything; when asked for the R source location, point to the svn checked-out location. Set the PATH environment variable to include the installed location of Rtools/bin to your PATH.
• Install MikTeX

• Build R in the source directory

  cd R-3-4-branch/src/gnuwin32
  cp MkRules.dist MkRules.local
  make rsync-extsoft
  make -j

• Use your version of R, e.g., ../../bin/i386/Rgui.exe