[Rd] Copying libraries from one version of R to another (was Re: MikTeX will be assumed in R 2.2.0 in Windows)

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 9/9/2005 10:11 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> On 9/9/05, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
>> I've just committed some changes to allow R to be built and to use
>> MikTeX without needing the Rd.sty files to be installed to localtexmf.
>> Unfortunately, the changes are not compatible with other TeX packages,
>> so if you're not using MikTeX you'll need to edit a couple of the config
>> files (or set an environment variable).
>> 
>> I'd appreciate hearing of any problems during the alpha or beta test period.
>> 
>> A binary build containing the changes should be on CRAN tomorrow or the
>> next day.  Look for revision 35546 or higher.
> 
> The above improvement was one of the key things one had to look out
> for in installing R that was not already covered in the R setup procedure.
> 
> The other one is to copy the libraries from your old R version to your
> new one (unless you want to share libraries among versions).  I have
> a batch file in the devel version of batchfiles to do that but if this were
> made part of the installation procedure I could eliminate it or if it
> were included it would be much less necessary.

I've just committed a change to the installer that partially addresses 
this.  Now, when a user does an install, the installer records the 
version number and path in the registry.  This way you can have multiple 
versions installed at once and there's a well-defined way to find them. 
  (Well, there will be as soon as we've had time to release multiple 
versions that do this.)

There's also a bit more help for non-admins to do
installs.  So an admin who installs just one copy of R will have
something like this in their registry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\R-core]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\R-core\R]
"InstallPath"="F:\\R\\R-2.2.0alpha"
"Current Version"="2.2.0 alpha"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\R-core\R\2.2.0 alpha]
"InstallPath"="F:\\R\\R-2.2.0alpha"

while a non-admin will get just this:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\R-core]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\R-core\R]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\R-core\R\2.2.0 alpha]
"InstallPath"="C:\\Documents and Settings\\test\\My
Documents\\R\\R-2.2.0alpha"

If you want to see previously installed versions, you should search 
through HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\R-core\R and 
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\R-core\R to see what's there.

This went in to revision 35562 a few minutes ago; I'm not sure how long 
it will take to propagate to the alpha tarball and to the build on CRAN.

Duncan Murdoch