[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 9/13/2005 1:55 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> Thanks. That's great.  If I understand correctly, versions that
> are as of the one you just uploaded will have this facility and for older
> versions I need to search in the old, existing, way.  Thus once 2.3, say,
> comes out we will have 2.2. and 2.3 in the registry.
> 
> That means that as of 2.3 it will be possible to have an R program
> that checks for the older versions via the registry and redownloads everything
> from CRAN to the new version.  

Probably even sooner than that -- 2.2.1 will be recorded as a different 
version than 2.2.0.

> It would be important that that
> program is distributed with R and possibly invoked automatically
> as part of the installation process since its best not to have
> to install a package in order to install package.  I assume you
> will be doing that by that time so I can probably don't need to
> provide anything in batchfiles.  Maybe I
> should just hold off on this area since it hardly seems worthwihle to do 
> development whose lifespan is just one version.

It's probably not a good idea to assume that I'll do it :-).  Putting 
together a simple package that does this would be nice, and would be 
available sooner than 2.3.0.

Duncan Murdoch

> By the way I did find a tool, sigcheck.exe, on sysinternals.com
> that will find the file and product versions and running it on RGui.exe
> it does work.  I am considering whether to use that or not to
> Rversions.hta.
> 
> Regards.
> 
> 
> On 9/13/05, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
>> 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
>>