Offer zip builds

I am on macOS primarily, albeit, I have run both Windows and Linux routinely
in years past.

With all due respect, then you have no business in this thread.

That being said, these days, I do run Windows 10 under a Parallels VM on
macOS, as I have a single commercial application that I need to run for
clients now and then, and it sadly only runs on a real Windows install (e.g.
not with Wine).

Further demonstrating my point. You run Windows in a virtual machine, meaning
even if you encountered some bad installer, you could just revert to a snapshot
or similar.

To your points:

[bunch of links]

I am sorry if I miscommunicated, I didnt and dont wish to be convinced about how
well behaved R installer is. I wish for R to offer zip builds. Many other
programming languages do:

- http://strawberryperl.com/releases.html
- https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet-core/2.2
- https://golang.org/dl
- https://nim-lang.org/install_windows.html
- https://python.org/downloads/release/python-373
- https://windows.php.net/download

As I see it, the question isnt "should R offer zip builds", its "why isnt R
offering zip builds".

Unless you can make the case to them to expend the finite resources that they
have to support this as part of each version release process, in light of the
prior discussions, it is not clear that this appears to be a priority.

Thats the point of my original post. If they choose to continue with only EXE,
I will just keep using other programming languages. So you could see how it
might be in R interest to offer this, as no zip builds might be one of the
reasons people avoid the language.