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<xieyi...@gmail.com>
Phone: 515-294-2465 Web: http://yihui.name
Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA
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