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Static libraries for building RcppCWB on Windows

Following the model of R packages such as openssl, libcurl or tesseract, building RcppCWB on Windows relies on pre-compiled static libraries for C code with dependencies that are hard to satisfy on Windows. Offering cross-compiled binaries for download is an approach to ensure the portability of R packages with C code that works nicely. The rwinlib collection of repositories is an established place to host static libraries. This repository is the equivalent for building RcppCWB on Windows.

The approach is as follows:

• Executing an R script (file tools/winlibs.R within the package) is triggered by 'src/Makevars.win' when installing the package.
• The 'winlibs.R' script performs a download of static libraries necessary to compile C/C++ code from a GitHub repository. In the case of RcppCWB, the content of this repository is downloaded as a zip file.
• The 'PKG_LIBS' variable then includes a flag pointing to the static libraries that have been downloaded.

This repository includes three static libraries with CWB code that have been cross-compiled on a Linux machine for 32bit and 64bit R (lib/i386 and lib/x64 directory, respectively). Additional static libraries are included to ensure that relevant dependencies are present:

• GLib
• LibIntl
• PCRE

The CWB static libraries have been cross-compiled using Docker containers. The respective Dockerfiles are part of this repository.

• The Dockerfile in docker/gcc4.8 uses a Ubuntu 14.04 Docker container and GCC 4.8 is used for cross-compilation. This is historically the approach that runs smoothly, with limited side-effects. A bash file will run through the process and yield both 32 and 64 bit versions of the static libraries. These are copied into the repository.
• The Dockerfile in docker/gcc11.2 can be used to check errors and warnings that result from the most recent version of GCC.

A note on branches:

• Starting with RcppCWB v0.4.4.9003, static libraries are retrieved from the branch named after the version number of the CWB version to build.
• The branch gcc11 is there for historic reasons, because it is the branch retrieved by the CRAN release of RcppCWB.
• The main branch of this repository is not actively used.