Windows R.

These instructions were simplified from Duncan Murdoch's website, and may make life easier for those who are trying to build R packages under WindowsXP. It makes no claim to being up to date, but did work under R 2.4.0 as of 7 December 2006. I assume that you have an R package, with a DESCRIPTION file, etc. as described in Writing R Extensions, Section 1.1.

• Unzip the Unix tools for R. Put these in a sensible directory (I use C:/Program Files/GnuWin32/bin).
• Install ActivePerl for Windows.
• Install compilers by choosing gcc, g77, etc. when prompted.
• Install the Microsoft HTML Help Workshop.
• If you accepted the default installation locations (and the location for the Unix tools that I suggest above), add the following to your path environmental variable:
  C:\Program Files\R\R-2.4.0\bin;C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin;C:\MinGW\bin;C:\Program Files\HTML Help Workshop;
  Make sure there is a semi-colon at the end of the PATH before you append; that is, every path should be separated by a semi-colon. Also make sure that Perl is in the PATH, but the Perl installer should have taken care of that. And as R changes versions, put the appropriate version number in the R PATH.
• Start a command shell and go to the directory prior to the directory that holds your R package (e.g., if your package is mypackage, located in C:\working\mypackage, go to C:\working), and type
  R CMD INSTALL --build mypackage
  and you should have a mypackage_x.y-z.zip where x.y-z is the version number from your DESCRIPTION file.

Good luck!