[Rd] Wording of "R Installation and Administration"

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sun, 1 Jun 2003, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

> On Mon, 2 Jun 2003 09:11:51 +1200 (NZST), you wrote:
> 
> >Hi,
> >
> >I hope I haven't got this wrong, but I don't think one needs Perl 
> >installed if they install the "precompiled" packages for Windows right?
> 
> Right.
> 
> >
> >I'm just wondering if the first sentence in the "R Installation and 
> >Administration" can be re-worded a bit so newbies won't get confused....
> 
> I've rewritten it from this:
> 
> > "Installing source 
> >packages requires that Perl 5.004 or later be installed."  
> 
> to this:
> 
> "Packages may be distributed in source form or compiled binary form.
> Installing source packages requires that compilers and tools
> (including Perl 5.004 or later) be installed. Binary packages are
> platform specific and generally need no special tools to install, but
> see the documentation for your platform for details."
> 
> I hope that's clearer, but I'm not sure...

I am not at all sure it is clearer.  There are only binary packages in
common use for Windows (given that MacOS < X is only bug-fixed for 
1.7.x, and in any case excluded from that section).

Newcomers do need to learn some of the R terminology, and avoiding this 
one will only defer the problem a step or so.  Things like learning that
there are other OSes in the world than the one they use are necessary to 
make sense of R's docs.


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595