Wishlist: write R's bin path to the PATH variable and remove the version string in the installation dir under Windows
There are plenty of good reasons for non-developers to run different
versions of R. For instance, I care a lot about reproducibility. With
every new release of R, lots of things change. With every new release
of the packages I use, lots of things change. All of my analyses are
performed using Sweave, and every report includes a call to sessionInfo
so that the versions are recorded in the final report. If I have to go
back and tweak something in a report (say, to regenerate a figure in a
format more suitable for publication), I do not want the rest of the
analysis to change. So I have to run the correct (possibly older)
version of R. All of the stat analysts that we train follow the same
practice.
As a result, I am strongly opposed to an installation that automatically
mucks with the path to R.
Kevin
On 5/4/2011 11:00 AM, 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). Why isn't the default bin path for R under *nix something like /usr/bin/R-2.13.0/? 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. 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