Wishlist: write R's bin path to the PATH variable and remove the version string in the installation dir under Windows
On May 4, 2011, at 12:00 PM, Yihui Xie wrote:
My suggestion was to mimic *nix systems: put the executable binaries in the same place *by default* (e.g. /usr/bin/ or /usr/local/bin).
Except that there is not such thing on Windows! The closest to that is the "system" folder which is off limits for applications.
Why isn't the default bin path for R under *nix something like /usr/bin/R-2.13.0/?
It is on some unices (and most system-wide installations in practice) - but that's beside the point. Unix has a well-defined FHS so regardless where you install R you can always put a symlink into /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin. Windows has no such conventions so Gabor's solution is pretty much what you claim to want (and note that in unix you're exactly running a batch script with its rhome embedded to start R!). Even on unix you don't mess with PATH to select the R version to use.
If the users want to install multiple versions, they still have the choice to install them elsewhere. I'm not denying the possible necessity of having multiple versions in a system. In my opinion, the default values should be set according to probabilities: is it more likely for a user to use multiple versions or a single version of R? Of course, all of you are developers and the former probability might be higher, but I don't think many users will run the script A with R 2.12.1 and script B with R 2.13.0. The most typical situation I have seen is, (Windows) people install R and will forget to update it forever. I often have to urge our IT admin to update R in our department from a version released long long ago. You may argue my samples are not representative. Anyway, I can accept the default version string if nobody agrees with me.
Cheers, S
I do use Emacs every day. It's nice, I totally agree. 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 Wed, May 4, 2011 at 2:02 AM, Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
Note to Yihui Xie: I agree 100% with the other R core members (Duncan, Simon, Thomas) who already explained why it is *GOOD* to install R in version-named directories by default. BTW: If you use ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics) on Windows, it now automatically(*) finds all versions of R (* well, less generally, probably than Gabor's batch files; IIRC, we assume that the R versions were installed in the default place), and provides them, both the 32bit and 64bit versions, in the ESS menu, or via M-x R- [Tab completion] Very nice, very useful in my eyes. Martin
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