An update on this. Writing R Extensions does not recommend to have a
space character in R_HOME. This means that on Windows one either should
have SFN enabled (which is still the common case), or install into a
directory that does not have a space in its name (so specifically not
into "Program Files"). This recommendation unfortunately needs to stay
for now.
WRE recommends that Makefiles are written to be robust against space
characters inside R_HOME. All path names passed from a Makefile to the
shell should be quoted at least if they include R_HOME. Make "include"
directives should not be used on path names that are derived from
R_HOME, but one should instead use the "-f" option multiple times when
recursively invoking make. Maintainers of packages that use "include"
with R_HOME have been notified. Unfortunately, the number of packages
that do not quote pathnames with R_HOME in Makefiles is rather large, so
fixing will take some time.
Currently, R-devel should build fine on Windows with R_HOME including
space, including all base and recommended packages, and tests for these
packages should pass even though this is not regularly tested. If you
find a case when this does not work, please submit a bug report.
Thanks
Tomas
On 10/20/2017 04:29 PM, Tomas Kalibera wrote:
This has now been mostly fixed in R-devel. What remains to be resolved
is that some packages with custom make files cannot be installed from
source (when R is installed into a directory with space in its name
and short file names are not available)
Tomas
On 10/17/2017 10:37 AM, Tomas Kalibera wrote:
Hi Zach,
thanks for the report, I can reproduce the problem and confirm it is
a bug in R and will be fixed.
Hopefully it only impacts few users now. The workaround is to create
the short name for the directory where R is installed, using "fsutil
file setshortname" (for all elements of the path that contain space
in their name). One can revert this by setting the shortname to an
empty string (""). At least for the latter one may need to boot in
safe mode.
Best
Tomas
On 09/17/2017 08:23 PM, Zach Bjornson wrote:
Hello,
R appears to assume that Windows drives have short file names (SFN,
8.3)
enabled; for example, that "C:/Program Files/..." is addressable as
"C:/Progra~1/...". Newer versions of Windows have SFN disabled on
non-OS
drives, however.
This means that if you install R on a non-OS drive, you
- can't start R.exe from the command line.
- consequently, anything that attempts to spawn a new R process also
fails.
This includes a lot of the commands from the popular devtools
package. More
discussion and background:
https://github.com/hadley/devtools/issues/1514
I don't have access to bugzilla to file this there.
Thanks and best,
Zach
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