upgrading an R installation to next versoin

Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

On 6/30/05, J. Hosking <jh910 at juno.com> wrote:

...

I keep a separate directory ...\R\library for nonstandard packages,
with environment variable R_LIBS set to the directory name.

Do you mean your R_LIBS has two components: one to look in
..\R\rcurrent\library and a second to look in ..\R\library? What does
it look like exactly?

When you do install.packages(whatever) does it install to the
..\R\library rather than ..\R\rcurrent\library ?   Also, does
updates.packages() work as expected for you?

My R_LIBS environment variable is just

  R_LIBS=C:\progs\r\library

and within R I see

  > .libPaths()

  [1] "C:/progs/r/library"          "C:/progs/r/rcurrent/library"

i.e., the default library is automatically appended.  The help for
.libPaths explains this.  And yes, install.packages() installs to
C:\progs\R\library and update.packages() works as expected.

My miktex.ini file specifies ...\R\rcurrent\share\texmf as a place
to look for input files.

I think its necessary to rebuild the name data base in miktex too
    initexmf -u
although ignoring that step may work as long as the filenames
have not changed.

You are probably correct, though I have not yet encountered any problems
that I could attribute to not running initexmf -- no doubt the filenames
have not changed recently.

I was hoping to continue using a vanilla
miktex installation as I do now rather than having a custom miktex.ini
file.  At any rate my batch file would continue to work even with your setup
so I think I should be ok here.

That should take care of your points 3, 4, and 2, respectively.
Duncan's suggestion of an R_ENVIRON environment variable (which
I didn't know about; thanks, Duncan) should take care of point 1.

Jon Hosking

It occurs to me in reading this that I could keep the *.site files in
..\R and then have my miktex update batch file also copy them
to the appropriate etc folder.  Thus keeping an R\library folder
and running the batch file after each new installation would
address 1, 2 and 4 even without using the same name for the
rw... folder.  This still does not handle the shortcut key which
I would have to handle manually or determine if there is a way
I could also add that to my batch file.

Jon Hosking