In the r-sig-hpc email list, we were recently discussing installing R and
such. One user made a rather nice tutorial about it.

http://batempleton.wordpress.com/2013/11/22/installing-rcpp-using-c11-on-windows-x64/

I think that is rather well done.  We should provide an ESS instruction to
tell people how to revise the user's init.el to cooperate with that idea of
installing R NOT in the default spot.

Almost everybody agreed that R users, especially users of Rcpp, should NOT
install R in the default location. Some agree with me that one should
install in some location that does not include the R version, and then one
should all that bin/x64 directory to the system PATH.  A fairly large
plurality suggests installing in C:\R to avoid spaces altogether and
putting that in the path.  The current R behavior of installing in
C:\Program Files\R\R-x.x.x is very well suited to the developers who make R
itself, but it is a maintenance hassle for the rest of us who want only one
R at a time.

I'm thinking back to the Digital Unix development environment we used to
use, where the custom was each user would create a folder "packages" and
dump everything in there and add packages/bin to the path and packages/lib
to the ld library path.  I think we should recommend something like that.

But the Emacs/ESS solution, which looks only in c:\Program Files, certainly
discourages that.

Concerning reading the registry, I expect that Gabor Grothendieck knows how
to read the registry to get the R location. We could learn how this is done
from the source code for NPPTOR and/or RStudio.  They both manage it. I
notice that RStudio seems to get it right, almost invariably, while NPPTOR
is only about 70% right.

pj


On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 10:35 PM, Richard M. Heiberger <rmh@temple.edu>wrote:

> ESS finds R automatically when it is put in the default location
> c:/Program Files/R/
>
> It is up to you to tell ESS where R is if it is anywhere else.
> See the paragraph in ess-site.el that contains the line
> ;;(setq-default inferior-R-program-name "C:\\Program
> Files\\R\\R-2.5.0\\bin\\Rterm.exe")
> Installation instructions for Windows are very simple.
> Put ESS somewhere and in site-start.el tell ESS where with a line like this
>
>    (load-file "/PATH/TO/THIS/FILE/ess-site.el")
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 8:54 PM, Ross Boylan <ross@biostat.ucsf.edu>
> wrote:
>
> > I recently had Windows 7 installed on a computer, and then R 2.15 and
> > emacs 24.1.  ESS 12,04-4 is now working, but I thought I'd mention a
> couple
> > of rough spots.  My hope is that this report might lead to some
> > improvements in the installation  experience and documentation.
> >
> > I've installed and used ESS before on a number of linux and windows
> > systems.  I think I've often used Vincent Goulet's packages for Windows,
> > but since I already had emacs I didn't this time.
> >
> > First, I tried using emacs' new package management system, but ESS wasn't
> > in it.  You might consider using that distribution channel.
> >
> > Second, when I went to download the file from
> http://ess.r-project.org/**
> > index.php?Section=download<
> http://ess.r-project.org/index.php?Section=download>it was hard to find
> instructions.  The first paragraph says "To run ESS in
> > Emacs you have to first download the compressed eLisp source files and
> > install them according to the following instructions."  But there aren't
> > really any instructions on the page.  Eventually I tried the link to the
> > ESS manual at the bottom, although the description "Instructions on how
> to
> > retrieve ESS in particular or how to work with Subversion in general can
> be
> > found in the following documents:" was not too inviting.  First, it
> didn't
> > say which was which (it's pretty easy to guess, but why add friction?
>  The
> > git docs are clearly marked off); more importantly, my problem was not
> how
> > to retrieve the code but how to install it.  After some searching around
> in
> > the manual I found the relevant section, which is also in the README file
> > at the top of the directory of the unpacked zip.
> >
> > Finally, when I followed the instructions to install, I got to the 2nd
> > step and was happy about the "you're done."  When I tried to start R it
> > didn't work ("rterm not found").  Only then I realized I did not have an
> > ESS buffer, and even the instructions after the second step did not say
> how
> > to deal with rterm trouble, except to email this list.  A little more
> > searching solved that too, although the instructions contain one more
> > pitfall, I think.  The paragraph above the one with (setq
> > inferior-R-program-name "...") ends with the advice to "make sure to use
> > backslashes, '\' since Windows requires them."  Despite that, the setq
> > example uses forward slashes and I suspect backslashes would be
> interpreted
> > as escapes by elisp and fail, unless doubled.
> >
> > I'm not sure if ESS is supposed to be able to find R automatically; I
> > recall some discussion about that quite awhile ago.  FWIW, my
> installation
> > was at c:/Users/rdboylan/Documents/R/**R-2.15.0/bin/i386/Rterm.exe.
> > That's where the system adminstrator put it.
> >
> > Thanks for ESS!
> >
> > I don't need any particular response.
> >
> > Ross
> >
> > ______________________________**________________
> > ESS-help@r-project.org mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/**listinfo/ess-help<
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/ess-help>
> >
>
>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> ______________________________________________
> ESS-help@r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/ess-help
>



-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science      Assoc. Director
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504      Center for Research Methods
University of Kansas                 University of Kansas
http://pj.freefaculty.org               http://quant.ku.edu

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