[Rcpp-devel] New Windows toolchain

[Duncan Murdoch]

I've told some of you privately that I'm basically not going to be
working on this again before next Wednesday, due to travel.  The 3.2.0
release process starts on Monday, and I will be travelling for all but
two weeks before the release, so there is very little time left for changes.

So here's what I plan to do:

By the end of next week I will decide on what toolchain to include in
Rtools.  This will be based largely on what I hear from this group,
because the main advantage of the new toolchain is C++ support.

I think there are 2 likely choices, with a third possible.  We could use
the Rtools33 toolchain that is currently on CRAN.  This appears likely
to require changes by C++ users.  Alternatively, we could revert to the
previous toolchain, based on gcc 4.6.3.  If we do revert, we will be
able to change for R 3.2.1, which is unscheduled, but likely to appear
in June, judging by past history.

The 3rd possibility is that someone other than me makes small changes to
the toolchain (the scripts are on CRAN in bin/windows/Rtools/scripts),
and enough people test the resulting chain so we have general agreement
that the modification works.  It needs to be someone other than me,
because I need to try it out in my own tests, and that means I need to
have it in hand by Wednesday, if I'm going to decide by Friday.  I will
not build this into Rtools before next Friday, so you'll need to
distribute this by some other means.

Duncan Murdoch