Wishlist: write R's bin path to the PATH variable and remove the version string in the installation dir under Windows
On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 7:44 PM, Yihui Xie <xie at yihui.name> 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; 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); 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.
The above seems very awkward. If you want to do it temporarily each time you use R its going to be MUCH slower than using batch files since you will have to start up R and then run an R program. To do it permanently implies mucking with your system settings and leaving it in a changed state and that seems worse than the batch file approach which requires no such permanent change. Your (2) is unnecessary using the batch files since they automatically find R regardless of what you name the directory. In other situations if you want to set the path using R you already need to know the path to R in order to run R in the first place and if you know the path to R in order to run it why do you need to set the path?
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