11  Building the source distribution

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The primary distribtution of the R sources is as a tarball of an SVN checkout of the source tree with some (text, HTML, PDF) documentation pre-built.

This is prepared by running make dist at the top level of an R build directory, after make all and appropriate checks have been run. This creates a gzip-compressed tarball named something like

R_2025-11-04_r88984.tar.gz

which can be re-named and re-compressed as desired. (xz-compressied tarballs are also offered for the release and snapshot distributions; they are around 25% smaller.)

This can be done on macOS, but features of its file system can lead to unwanted files and headers being included. So for safety use

make dist TAR='/usr/bin/tar --no-xattrs --no-mac-metadata'

If adding files to the R sources it is impoertant to check that they are included in the tarabll distoibution. To do so use something like

make dist
tar -xf R-devel_*
diff -r R-devel SVN_SRCDIR
rm -rf R-devel

Some differences are to be expected such as

Only in SVN_SRCDIR: .svn
Only in R-devel: SVN-REVISION
Only in R-devel/doc: FAQ
Only in R-devel/doc: NEWS
Only in R-devel/doc: NEWS.pdf
Only in R-devel/doc: RESOURCES
Only in R-devel/doc/html: NEWS.html
Only in R-devel/doc/html: R-admin.html
Only in R-devel/doc/html: resources.html
Only in R-devel/src/library/grid/inst/doc: displaylist.pdf
Only in R-devel/src/library/grid/inst/doc: frame.pdf
Only in R-devel/src/library/grid/inst/doc: grid.pdf
Only in R-devel/src/library/grid/inst/doc: grobs.pdf
Only in R-devel/src/library/grid/inst/doc: interactive.pdf
Only in R-devel/src/library/grid/inst/doc: locndimn.pdf
Only in R-devel/src/library/grid/inst/doc: moveline.pdf
Only in R-devel/src/library/grid/inst/doc: nonfinite.pdf
Only in R-devel/src/library/grid/inst/doc: plotexample.pdf
Only in R-devel/src/library/grid/inst/doc: rotated.pdf
Only in R-devel/src/library/grid/inst/doc: saveload.pdf
Only in R-devel/src/library/grid/inst/doc: sharing.pdf
Only in R-devel/src/library/grid/inst/doc: viewports.pdf
Only in R-devel/src/library/parallel: inst
Only in R-devel/src/library/stats: inst
Only in R-devel/src/library/utils/inst: doc

Next: Use of TeX dialects, Previous: Testing R code, Up: R Internals   [Contents][Index]