On 12/07/2017 06:15 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
On 7 December 2017 at 17:56, Tomas Kalibera wrote:
|
| An update on this. Writing R Extensions does not recommend to have a
| space character in R_HOME. This means that on Windows one either should
| have SFN enabled (which is still the common case), or install into a
| directory that does not have a space in its name (so specifically not
| into "Program Files"). This recommendation unfortunately needs to stay
| for now.
|
| WRE recommends that Makefiles are written to be robust against space
| characters inside R_HOME. All path names passed from a Makefile to the
| shell should be quoted at least if they include R_HOME. Make "include"
| directives should not be used on path names that are derived from
| R_HOME, but one should instead use the "-f" option multiple times when
| recursively invoking make. Maintainers of packages that use "include"
| with R_HOME have been notified. Unfortunately, the number of packages
| that do not quote pathnames with R_HOME in Makefiles is rather large, so
| fixing will take some time.
|
| Currently, R-devel should build fine on Windows with R_HOME including
| space, including all base and recommended packages, and tests for these
| packages should pass even though this is not regularly tested. If you
| find a case when this does not work, please submit a bug report.
Why does the Windows installer default to using a directory with spaces?
It's a convention on Windows and I guess there may be problems with
permissions on other directories. My hope is we can make R work reliably
without SFN just in time before SFN become disabled by default, after
all, quoting pathnames in Makefiles (or shell scripts for that matter)
is a good practice anyway and avoiding "include" is not a big problem as
very few packages are affected.
But thanks for opening this and I am happy for insights from any Windows
experts on the issue. I would not want to violate the convention for all
users when just few of them have SFN disabled, and as I hope this will
be fixed on R/packages side, but maybe the installer could at least
detect the problem (when "Program Files" or another specified target
directory did not have a short name). Or perhaps also suggest a
different default. Certainly R could print a warning when it starts.
Tomas
Related (but moderately more advanced), why does R still install "everything"
under one (versioned) directory so that uninformed users on upgrade "miss"
all previously installed packages?
Why not (with space for exposition here, imagine s/ // everywhere below)
$SOMEROOTDIR / R /
R-a.b.c/ # before
R-a.b.d/ # d > c, here
site-library/ # with .libPaths having this preset?
I don't really care as I manage to work mostly / entirely on another OS, but
I just don't understand why we do not put two and two together. But I am
likely unaware of some salient issues.
In any event, I appreciate the thankless work of those taking care of Windoze
(ie Tomas, Jeroen, Duncan (now ex-officio), Brian, ...)
Dirk
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