[Rd] R-1.2.3: a small suggestion (PR#961)

[Kurt Hornik]

>>>>> A J Rossini writes:

> On 1 Jun 2001, Peter Dalgaard BSA wrote:

>> rossini@blindglobe.net (A.J. Rossini) writes:
>> 
>> > >>>>> "r" == ripley  <ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:
>> >
>> >     r> There is a serious problem with that. All the user-installed
>> >     r> packages in /usr/local/lib/R-1.2.3/library disappear from view
>> >     r> on upgrade.  They would need to be migrated.
>> >
>> > One thought would be to emulate XEmacs in this regard -- lisp packages
>> > are in equivalent of /usr/local/lib/R, while version-specific code is
>> > in the equivalent of /usr/local/lib/R-version.
>> 
>> But R packages are not always binary compatible between releases. You
>> can't win. I think most of the development team just use the "run from
>> builddir" option.
>> 
>> Could we perhaps add a configure switch to install in R-$VERSION ?
>> 
>> --versioned-install or something like that. Kurt?

> Alternatively, let people do it both ways, and suffer (i.e. install
> libraries in the versioned location, as well as in the "generic"
> location).

> (I'm feeling really grumpy this year).

With me quickly getting there this morning ...

I had asked about multiple version (and also platform) support several
times during the past few years, and had always been told that this was
not necessary.  So why does this keep coming up?

One can add a version layer, but one has to do this right.  Patterning
after the Emacs model is wrong.  Binary incompatabilities were pointed
out, so

	PREFIX/lib/R/VERSION
	PREFIX/lib/R/site

is not good enough.  Emacs has added [the equivalent of]

	PREFIX/lib/R/site/VERSION

but that requires external control of version dependency at install
time.  We actually have the required info through the DESCRIPTION db,
hence could take care of this.

But the effort is really only worth it when one is interested in having
different versions installed at the same time.  Otherwise, you can
always do

	make install
	(cd PREFIX/lib; mv R R-VERSION)

yourself.

Developers, as PD says, typically rely on running their development
version from BUILDDIR.  Otoh, this is wrong because they could end up
with an incompatible add-on package in the site tree.  And we are back
to the long-made decision that God did not want us to run multiple R
versions at the same time.

-k
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