Rtools Collection This is the Rtools.txt file, which will be installed in the main Rtools directory. See also the README.txt file there, which describes the origin of some of the tools. The tools installed in the Rtools\MinGW directory are from the MinGW distribution. Perl is installed in Rtools\perl; those files come from Vanilla Perl. CYGWIN Some of the R tools use the Cygwin DLLs, which are included. If you already have Cygwin installed, you should not install these (but see "EXISTING CYGWIN INSTALLATIONS" below). REMAINING TASKS This installer doesn't install all of the tools necessary to build R or R packages, because of license or size limitations. The remaining tools are all available online (at no charge) as described below. TO BUILD R PACKAGES, you may optionally want items 1 and 2 below (LaTeX and the HTML Help Workshop). TO BUILD R, you need these plus item 3 below (Inno Setup). Finally, the Rtools installer will optionally edit your PATH variable as follows: PATH=c:\Rtools\bin;c:\Rtools\perl\bin;c:\Rtools\MinGW\bin;c:\R\bin; (where you will substitute appropriate directories for the ones listed above, but please keep the path in the same order as shown. LaTeX and the HTML Help Workshop should be installed among the "others".) REMAINING ITEMS 1. You may install LaTeX, available from http://www.miktex.org LaTeX is used to build .pdf forms of documentation. 2. You may install the Microsoft HTML Help Workshop, available from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms669985.aspx This is needed to build the .chm help files. 3. You need the Inno Setup installer, available from http://www.innosetup.com to build the R installer. VERSIONS This installer includes the following versions of the MinGW packages: binutils-2.19.1-mingw32 gcc-core-4.2.1-sjlj-2 gcc-g++-4.2.1-sjlj-2 gcc-gfortran-4.2.1-sjlj-2 gcc-objc-4.2.1-sjlj-2 mingw-runtime-3.14 w32api-3.13-mingw32 Vanilla Perl is from build 7 of that package. The Cygwin tools and DLLs were updated on February 18, 2009. They are taken from base-files 3.7-1 coreutils 6.10-2 cygwin 1.5.25-15 diffutils 2.8.7-1 findutils 4.4.0-3 gawk 3.1.6-1 grep 2.5.3-1 gzip 1.3.12-2 texinfo 4.13-3 The bitmap libraries are based on the following versions: jpegsrc.v6b (For R 2.9.x) jpegsrc.v7 (For R 2.10.x) libpng-1.2.40 tiff-3.8.2 Tcl/Tk is version 8.5.6. tar is a locally modified version of tar version 1.21. EXISTING CYGWIN INSTALLATIONS If you already have a full Cygwin installation, then you should not install our Cygwin DLLs in the Rtools/bin directory. You should make sure your existing cygwin/bin directory is on the path (*after* all the other entries listed above) and use the DLLs from there. However, this may not work if your Cygwin installation is too old. In that case the Rtools utilities will fail to run. To fix this, you should update the Cygwin installation, or (with great care!) replace the DLLs with the ones from the Rtools distribution. Be very careful, because if you have incompatible DLLs, your Cygwin tools will stop working.