On Thu, 31 May 2001 beebe@math.utah.edu wrote:
[This is not a bug report, just a suggestion.]
With complex packages, it is often useful to maintain multiple
versions installed, for bug checking, and performance comparisons, and
for developers, for a development history (e.g., I have about 30
versions of ghostscript, whose development I contribute to, and I have
on several occasions run tests files on with each them to find out
when a change in behavior was introduced).
The common way to do this is to suffix a version number to the
executable and any file tree(s) that it requires.
The R-1.2.3 release does not currently do this, but it looks like only
a couple of lines of changes are needed to accomplish the job, and
I've done so locally manually.
(1) In the R script, change
R_HOME_DIR=/usr/local/lib/R
to
R_HOME_DIR=/usr/local/lib/R-1.2.3
and name the tree that way during installation.
(2) At installation time, first install the executable as
/usr/local/bin/R-1.2.3, then remove /usr/local/bin/R,
then do "ln -s R-1.2.3 /usr/local/bin/R" or
"ln R-1.2.3 /usr/local/bin/R", in that order. This
ensures that any existing version of R remains on the system,
accessible as R-x.y.z.
[Obviously, in the above, "/usr/local" is really "$(prefix)".]
I suggest that the next round of R distribution consider incorporating
this change.
There is a serious problem with that. All the user-installed packages in /usr/local/lib/R-1.2.3/library disappear from view on upgrade. They would need to be migrated.
Brian D. Ripley, ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272860 (secr) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-devel mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-devel-request@stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._