R 3.x for Windows (retired)

Scripts used to build R 3.3.x - 3.6.x on Windows

Important: retirement notice

This repository was used to build daily R-devel installers and official R releases of R 3.3 - 3.6. As of R version 4.0 (April 2020), we have switched to a new build system based on rtools40, found here: https://github.com/r-windows/r-base.

The current repository will be kept around for historical purposes (and it may still work) but is no longer maintained.

Local Requirements

Building R on Windows requires the following tools:

Rtools 3.5 compiler toolchain
Recent MiKTeX + packages fancyvrb, inconsolata, epsf, mptopdf, url
Inno Setup to build the installer
Perl such as Strawberry Perl

Each of these can also be installed using chocolatey:

choco install rtools --version=3.5.0.4
choco install miktex
choco install innosetup
choco install strawberryperl

Alternatively, the appveyor-tools.ps1 powershell script can also be used for unattended installation of these tools.

Building

To build manually first clone this repository plus dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/rwinlib/base
cd base
git submodule update --init

Running build-r-devel.bat or build-r-patched.bat will automatically download the latest R-devel.tar.gz or R-patched.tar.gz and start the build.

build-r-devel.bat

The appveyor.yml file has more details.

AppVeyor Deployment

This repository is used for daily builds on appveyor which get deployed on the ftp server. See appveyor.md and appveyor.yml for configuration details.

Release Steps

For release manager:

Uncomment and update the release url in appveyor.yml
Commit to temp branch, tag release locally and push tag to GH.
Download artifact from AppVeyor. Edit tag to attach zip and release.
Create new dir in base/old/ on the FTP and unzip the files
Rename md5sum.txt file and copy files to base/
Copy (dont symlink) R-x.y.z-win.exe to R-x.y.zpatched-win.exe as placeholder until R-patched is uploaded tomorrow