Wishlist: write R's bin path to the PATH variable and remove the version string in the installation dir under Windows

1. "Few Windows users use these commands" does not imply they are not
useful, and I have no idea how many Windows users really use them. How
do you run "R CMD build" when you build R packages under Windows? You
don't write "C:/Program Files/R/R-2.13.0/bin/i386/R.exe CMD build", do
you?

I think the reason we have to mess with the PATH variable for each
single software package is that Windows is Not Unix, so you may hate
Windows instead of a package that modifies your PATH variable.

For the choice of i386 and x64, you can let the user decide which bin
path to use. I believe the number of users who frequently switch back
and forth is fairly small.

2. Under most circumstances I just keep the latest version of R. To
maintain R code with old R versions will be more and more difficult
with new features and changes coming in. Disk space is cheap, but time
is not.

I'm talking about the default installation directory here and I'm only
wishing that the version string could be removed by default.

Anyway, I think I will go to the batch files approach if these
suggestions are going to be turned down. I just don't want to tell
other people to run Rscript.bat under Windows and Rscript under *nix.
I hope they can be consistent.

Regards,
Yihui
--
Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
Phone: 515-294-2465 Web: http://yihui.name
Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA



On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 8:14 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:

On 03/05/2011 7:44 PM, Yihui Xie wrote:

Hi,

I guess this issue must have been brought forward long time ago, but I
still hope you can consider under Windows (during installation):

1. put R's bin path in the PATH variable of the system so that we can
use the commands "R" and "Rscript" more easily;

Few Windows users use those commands.  The ones who do are generally exactly
the ones who know how to edit the PATH variable themselves.

For most users (the ones who start R from the shortcut), there's no need to
mess with the PATH variable.  Personally, I hate programs that do that.  And
with R, it's now complicated, because there are 2 different directories
holding executables:  bin/i386 and bin/x64.  (The bin directory also holds
some, but that's just for back  compatibility.)
How could the installer know which of those to put in the PATH?  At
installation time, a user isn't going to know which one he/she needs.

2. remove the version string like R-2.13.0 in the default installation
directory, e.g. only use a directory like C:/Program Files/R/ instead
of C:/Program Files/R/R-2.13.0/; I know many people just follow the
default setting when installing R, and this version string will often
lead to many (unnecessary) copies of R in the system and brings
difficulty to the first issue (several possible bin directories);

Multiple installs give you the possibility of reproducing things that don't
work in the latest R version.  I think it's a good practice to keep multiple
installs on your system if you have the space, and since disk space is cheap
these days, that's not so uncommon.

Duncan Murdoch

I'm aware of some existing efforts in overcoming the difficulty of
calling R under Windows like the R batch files project
(http://code.google.com/p/batchfiles/), but I believe this is better
to be solved in R directly.

Thanks!

Regards,
Yihui
--
Yihui Xie<xieyihui at gmail.com>
Phone: 515-294-2465 Web: http://yihui.name
Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA