Copying libraries from one version of R to another (was Re: MikTeX will be assumed in R 2.2.0 in Windows)

Thanks. That's great.  If I understand correctly, versions that
are as of the one you just uploaded will have this facility and for older
versions I need to search in the old, existing, way.  Thus once 2.3, say,
comes out we will have 2.2. and 2.3 in the registry.

That means that as of 2.3 it will be possible to have an R program
that checks for the older versions via the registry and redownloads everything
from CRAN to the new version.  

It would be important that that
program is distributed with R and possibly invoked automatically
as part of the installation process since its best not to have
to install a package in order to install package.  I assume you
will be doing that by that time so I can probably don't need to
provide anything in batchfiles.  Maybe I
should just hold off on this area since it hardly seems worthwihle to do 
development whose lifespan is just one version.

By the way I did find a tool, sigcheck.exe, on sysinternals.com
that will find the file and product versions and running it on RGui.exe
it does work.  I am considering whether to use that or not to
Rversions.hta.

Regards.


On 9/13/05, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:

On 9/9/2005 10:11 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

On 9/9/05, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:

I've just committed some changes to allow R to be built and to use
MikTeX without needing the Rd.sty files to be installed to localtexmf.
Unfortunately, the changes are not compatible with other TeX packages,
so if you're not using MikTeX you'll need to edit a couple of the config
files (or set an environment variable).

I'd appreciate hearing of any problems during the alpha or beta test period.

A binary build containing the changes should be on CRAN tomorrow or the
next day.  Look for revision 35546 or higher.

The above improvement was one of the key things one had to look out
for in installing R that was not already covered in the R setup procedure.

The other one is to copy the libraries from your old R version to your
new one (unless you want to share libraries among versions).  I have
a batch file in the devel version of batchfiles to do that but if this were
made part of the installation procedure I could eliminate it or if it
were included it would be much less necessary.

I've just committed a change to the installer that partially addresses
this.  Now, when a user does an install, the installer records the
version number and path in the registry.  This way you can have multiple
versions installed at once and there's a well-defined way to find them.
 (Well, there will be as soon as we've had time to release multiple
versions that do this.)

There's also a bit more help for non-admins to do
installs.  So an admin who installs just one copy of R will have
something like this in their registry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\R-core]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\R-core\R]
"InstallPath"="F:\\R\\R-2.2.0alpha"
"Current Version"="2.2.0 alpha"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\R-core\R\2.2.0 alpha]
"InstallPath"="F:\\R\\R-2.2.0alpha"

while a non-admin will get just this:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\R-core]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\R-core\R]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\R-core\R\2.2.0 alpha]
"InstallPath"="C:\\Documents and Settings\\test\\My
Documents\\R\\R-2.2.0alpha"

If you want to see previously installed versions, you should search
through HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\R-core\R and
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\R-core\R to see what's there.

This went in to revision 35562 a few minutes ago; I'm not sure how long
it will take to propagate to the alpha tarball and to the build on CRAN.

Duncan Murdoch