testing a Windows custom installer

John Fox

Wed, Jul 20, 2011 9:18 AM

Dear Duncan,

First, thanks to Duncan and others for addressing my question.

In light of Duncan's remarks, I've arrived at the following procedure, which
seems to work:

(1) Install R using my custom installer.

(2) Uninstall the newly installed R. This clears the registry but leaves my
other installed versions of R undisturbed.

(3) Reinstall R using the custom installer.

BTW, following this procedure, I found that an option in the installer that
wasn't set the way I want and was able to fix it.

Best,
 John

-----Original Message-----
From: Duncan Murdoch [mailto:murdoch.duncan at gmail.com]
Sent: July-20-11 10:57 AM
To: John Fox
Cc: R-devel at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [Rd] testing a Windows custom installer

On 20/07/2011 10:29 AM, John Fox wrote:

Dear R-devel list members,

For several years, I've created a custom R installer for my students
who use Windows. When I test the installer on my own Windows machines,
selections in the installation dialogs reflect my previous choices,
which I suppose are saved in the Windows registry.

I'd like to be able to see what a student who has never installed R
before will see, to verify that an installation that takes all
defaults in the custom installer produces the desired result. In the
past, I've dealt with this problem by finding a Windows machine on
which R has never been installed, but that's inconvenient (and, as R
proliferates will, I hope, become impossible!). Is there a better

approach?

The settings are saved to the registry by the installer, Inno Setup, and
restored automatically (for most of them), or using its
"GetPreviousData" function (for the R specific ones).  I don't think
there is a way to tell the installer to ignore the previous data, but
there might be.

I believe if you uninstall R then the settings will be forgotten,
because the settings are saved in locations like

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\R
for Windows 2.13.0_is1 in string values named "Inno Setup: *" for the
ones used internally, and "Inno Setup Codefile:
*" for the ones specific to R.

It's probably okay to delete that whole key and then it will forget the
old settings, but that seems risky.

There's a command line option to the installer called "/SAVEINF" which
saves the settings to a file and "/LOADINF" which loads them from a
file, but I don't see how to tell it to just ignore the registry
settings.

Duncan Murdoch

testing a Windows custom installer

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