Makevars or Makevars.in

[Paul Gilbert]

I am just trying to adjust one of my packages so the C code builds in
Windows.  This is code that has been around for a long time, and I'm am
only a casual reader of C, so it has had the "if it is not broken don't
touch it" approach for many years.  The section 1.2.1 "Using Makevars"  
of "Writing R extensions" starts:

"Sometimes writing your own configure script can be avoided by supplying
a file Makevars: also one of the most common uses of a configure script
is to make Makevars from Makevars.in." ...

I am still a bit confused about whether packages src/ should have, in
addition to Makevars.win, a file Makevars or a file Makevars.in.  The
rest of the section seems to imply that the file should be Makevars, but
the first four examples I pulled of CRAN all have Makevars.in. My
confusion is about whether R scripts will automatically turn Makevars.in
into Makevars or would I need my own configure script to do this (and I
am hoping not to need a configure script).

Which is preferred? (And could the first paragraph of the section be
made more explicit?)

Thanks,
Paul

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[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 10 Nov 2009, Paul Gilbert wrote:

> I am just trying to adjust one of my packages so the C code builds in
> Windows.  This is code that has been around for a long time, and I'm am only
> a casual reader of C, so it has had the "if it is not broken don't touch it"
> approach for many years.  The section 1.2.1 "Using Makevars"  of "Writing R
> extensions" starts:
>
> "Sometimes writing your own configure script can be avoided by supplying a
> file Makevars: also one of the most common uses of a configure script is to
> make Makevars from Makevars.in." ...
>
> I am still a bit confused about whether packages src/ should have, in
> addition to Makevars.win, a file Makevars or a file Makevars.in.  The rest of
> the section seems to imply that the file should be Makevars, but the first
> four examples I pulled of CRAN all have Makevars.in. My confusion is about
> whether R scripts will automatically turn Makevars.in into Makevars or would
> I need my own configure script to do this (and I am hoping not to need a
> configure script).
>
> Which is preferred? (And could the first paragraph of the section be made
> more explicit?)

I think you need to read the earlier mentions of Makevars in that
manual: your confusion seems to be that you have jumped in to a later
section.  The only use of src/Makevars.in is that it is a conventional
name for a template file for configure to turn into src/Makevars.  As
the manual says

   The default rules can be tweaked by setting macros in a file
   @file{src/Makevars} ... There are platform-specific file names on
   Windows: @file{src/Makevars.win} takes precedence over
   @file{src/Makevars}.

So to tweak the make rules you need src/Makevars: if you need a
platform-specific version you need src/Makevars and src/Makevars.win.
You may choose to use configure (or configure.win) to make these, but
you do not need to (and packages using e.g. LAPACK or BLAS do not do
so).

--
Brian D. Ripley,                  [hidden email]
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  [phone] (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     [phone] (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  [phone]

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