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 <xieyi...@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 <maech...@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 > ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
