Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

update link to guide on how to install Rtools on Windows #637

Open
avallecam opened this issue Apr 19, 2024 · 3 comments
Open

update link to guide on how to install Rtools on Windows #637

avallecam opened this issue Apr 19, 2024 · 3 comments

Comments

@avallecam
Copy link

The currently linked guide suggests I install Rstan; is that action needed to install Rtools? or fresh users may need to install Rstan too?

EpiNow2/README.Rmd

Lines 102 to 104 in 3b2a10d

Windows users will need a working installation of Rtools in order to build the package from source. See [here](https://github.com/stan-dev/rstan/wiki/RStan-Getting-Started#checking-the-c-toolchain) for a guide to installing Rtools for use with Stan (which is the statistical modelling platform used for the underlying model). For simple deployment/development a prebuilt docker image is also available (see documentation [here](https://github.com/epiforecasts/EpiNow2/wiki/Docker)).

I found a plain installation guide at http://jtleek.com/modules/01_DataScientistToolbox/02_10_rtools/#1

I plan to add four steps on the tutorial setup websites to solve this issue reported by one workshop participant epiverse-trace/tutorials-middle#55

@jamesmbaazam
Copy link
Contributor

jamesmbaazam commented Apr 24, 2024

The currently linked guide suggests I install Rstan; is that action needed to install Rtools? or fresh users may need to install Rstan too?

Hi @avallecam Windows users generally need to install Rtools to install/build other packages (that need compilation at some point), so maybe that's why they were getting an error when installing Rstan.

In the link in the README here, the section on [Configuring the C toolchain(https://github.com/stan-dev/rstan/wiki/RStan-Getting-Started#configuring-c-toolchain) has a section on Windows that explains how to install Rtools.

In the tutorials, you may have to provide the steps for Windows users in that order, i.e., Check that rtools is installed using {devtools}, else install {rtools} and confirm it works by installing and using {devtools} to check, then install {EpiNow2} (which installs Rstan as a dependency).

Hope this clarifies this issue. If so, we can close it as resolved.

@avallecam
Copy link
Author

Thank you for the clarification. Now, I have managed to find the instructions for Windows.

I would suggest that if the paragraph in the README is exclusive to Windows users, then, the link could refer directly to the "C toolchain to Windows". However, the installation of a version of Rtools depends on the local version of R, so possibly a clearer link could refer to this link https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/.

For me this issue is resolved, but I would leave this suggestion to your consideration.

@sbfnk sbfnk added this to the CRAN v1.6 release milestone May 3, 2024
@jamesmbaazam
Copy link
Contributor

jamesmbaazam commented May 8, 2024

Thanks, Andree. I think we are better off generalizing it to all operating systems because I also had to set up the C++ toolchain on my new MacBook and it was quite difficult for someone coming from Windows.

This will be addressed in the v1.6.0 release.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

3 participants