On 03/05/2011 7:44 PM, Yihui Xie wrote:
Hi,
I guess this issue must have been brought forward long time ago, but I
still hope you can consider under Windows (during installation):
1. put R's bin path in the PATH variable of the system so that we can
use the commands "R" and "Rscript" more easily;
Few Windows users use those commands. The ones who do are generally
exactly the ones who know how to edit the PATH variable themselves.
For most users (the ones who start R from the shortcut), there's no need
to mess with the PATH variable. Personally, I hate programs that do
that. And with R, it's now complicated, because there are 2 different
directories holding executables: bin/i386 and bin/x64. (The bin
directory also holds some, but that's just for back compatibility.)
How could the installer know which of those to put in the PATH? At
installation time, a user isn't going to know which one he/she needs.
2. remove the version string like R-2.13.0 in the default installation
directory, e.g. only use a directory like C:/Program Files/R/ instead
of C:/Program Files/R/R-2.13.0/; I know many people just follow the
default setting when installing R, and this version string will often
lead to many (unnecessary) copies of R in the system and brings
difficulty to the first issue (several possible bin directories);
Multiple installs give you the possibility of reproducing things that
don't work in the latest R version. I think it's a good practice to
keep multiple installs on your system if you have the space, and since
disk space is cheap these days, that's not so uncommon.
Duncan Murdoch
I'm aware of some existing efforts in overcoming the difficulty of
calling R under Windows like the R batch files project
(http://code.google.com/p/batchfiles/), but I believe this is better
to be solved in R directly.
Thanks!
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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