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