The status quo for building the R package with the C++ library is a bit special (see procedure here) and requires that compilation happen with a specific toolchain for R. There is no guidance on how to get a successful build locally on Windows, and it's not covered by our CI so we are vulnerable to regression.
Goal for this ticket: recreate the environment from https://github.com/r-windows/rtools-backports in our Appveyor so that we can build and test R with C++ in continuous integration. Side effect of bringing the PKGBUILD configuration that the r-windows setup uses into our source control for easier release management. This should also get us closer to, perhaps arriving at, reproducible build steps for local Windows developers.
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