Re: [Rd] testing a Windows custom installer
On Wed, 2011-07-20 at 10:29 -0400, John Fox wrote: For several years, I've created a custom R installer for my students who use Windows. When I test the installer on my own Windows machines, selections in the installation dialogs reflect my previous choices, which I suppose are saved in the Windows registry. I'd like to be able to see what a student who has never installed R before will see, to verify that an installation that takes all defaults in the custom installer produces the desired result. In the past, I've dealt with this problem by finding a Windows machine on which R has never been installed, but that's inconvenient (and, as R proliferates will, I hope, become impossible!). Is there a better approach? I keep a Windows XP virtual machine image around in a 'clean' state for things like this. I spin up the 'clean' image, test what I need to test, and shut down the Windows image without snapshotting it. Regards, - Brian -- Brian G. Peterson http://braverock.com/brian/ Ph: 773-459-4973 IM: bgpbraverock __ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
Re: [Rd] testing a Windows custom installer
On 20/07/2011 10:29 AM, John Fox wrote: Dear R-devel list members, For several years, I've created a custom R installer for my students who use Windows. When I test the installer on my own Windows machines, selections in the installation dialogs reflect my previous choices, which I suppose are saved in the Windows registry. I'd like to be able to see what a student who has never installed R before will see, to verify that an installation that takes all defaults in the custom installer produces the desired result. In the past, I've dealt with this problem by finding a Windows machine on which R has never been installed, but that's inconvenient (and, as R proliferates will, I hope, become impossible!). Is there a better approach? The settings are saved to the registry by the installer, Inno Setup, and restored automatically (for most of them), or using its GetPreviousData function (for the R specific ones). I don't think there is a way to tell the installer to ignore the previous data, but there might be. I believe if you uninstall R then the settings will be forgotten, because the settings are saved in locations like HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\R for Windows 2.13.0_is1 in string values named Inno Setup: * for the ones used internally, and Inno Setup Codefile: * for the ones specific to R. It's probably okay to delete that whole key and then it will forget the old settings, but that seems risky. There's a command line option to the installer called /SAVEINF which saves the settings to a file and /LOADINF which loads them from a file, but I don't see how to tell it to just ignore the registry settings. Duncan Murdoch __ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
Re: [Rd] testing a Windows custom installer
Dear Duncan, First, thanks to Duncan and others for addressing my question. In light of Duncan's remarks, I've arrived at the following procedure, which seems to work: (1) Install R using my custom installer. (2) Uninstall the newly installed R. This clears the registry but leaves my other installed versions of R undisturbed. (3) Reinstall R using the custom installer. BTW, following this procedure, I found that an option in the installer that wasn't set the way I want and was able to fix it. Best, John -Original Message- From: Duncan Murdoch [mailto:murdoch.dun...@gmail.com] Sent: July-20-11 10:57 AM To: John Fox Cc: R-devel@r-project.org Subject: Re: [Rd] testing a Windows custom installer On 20/07/2011 10:29 AM, John Fox wrote: Dear R-devel list members, For several years, I've created a custom R installer for my students who use Windows. When I test the installer on my own Windows machines, selections in the installation dialogs reflect my previous choices, which I suppose are saved in the Windows registry. I'd like to be able to see what a student who has never installed R before will see, to verify that an installation that takes all defaults in the custom installer produces the desired result. In the past, I've dealt with this problem by finding a Windows machine on which R has never been installed, but that's inconvenient (and, as R proliferates will, I hope, become impossible!). Is there a better approach? The settings are saved to the registry by the installer, Inno Setup, and restored automatically (for most of them), or using its GetPreviousData function (for the R specific ones). I don't think there is a way to tell the installer to ignore the previous data, but there might be. I believe if you uninstall R then the settings will be forgotten, because the settings are saved in locations like HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\R for Windows 2.13.0_is1 in string values named Inno Setup: * for the ones used internally, and Inno Setup Codefile: * for the ones specific to R. It's probably okay to delete that whole key and then it will forget the old settings, but that seems risky. There's a command line option to the installer called /SAVEINF which saves the settings to a file and /LOADINF which loads them from a file, but I don't see how to tell it to just ignore the registry settings. Duncan Murdoch __ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
