[Rd] post-installation startup problem with 2.10.0

[Mark.Bravington at csiro.au]

I've just installed R2.10.0 v50082, and found the problem described below the first few times I launched it. Did not occur with v49613 (the previous most recent version I have). The problem has now gone away, and is therefore non-reproducible, but there seems to be something up with parameter processing or environment variable checking or loading of .RData files immediately after installation. Just thought you'd like to know.

I always start R in the same folder, where there's a ".RData" file that contains a '.First' function whose first lines are as follows:

function( skip.First=Sys.getenv( 'NOFIRST') != '') {
  if( skip.First) { # useful for command line startup when bugs in .First
    cat( 'Skipping .First\n')
return( invisible( NULL)) }
           ...
           
When I launched v50082 (simply by changing the path of R in the Windows "properties" box-- no other changes to what I normally do), it printed the "Skipping .First" message-- so '.First' was running, but deciding to abort. However, the NOFIRST environment variable was definitely not set. The other R versions that I have installed (latest v49613) didn't skip .First when launched in exactly the same way.

I modified the .First to first-of-all print 'skip.First', called 'save.image()', tried it in my other R versions, and relaunched v50082. This time, everything worked. I took out the print line, saved again, and relaunched v50082. Everything still worked! And has continued to since.

System info below-- the search path is of course what results _after_ '.First' has run, so it would have been different when I was having problems.

Mark

--
Mark Bravington
CSIRO Mathematical & Information Sciences
Marine Laboratory
Castray Esplanade
Hobart 7001
TAS

ph (+61) 3 6232 5118
fax (+61) 3 6232 5012
mob (+61) 438 315 623



--please do not edit the information below--

Version:
 platform = i386-pc-mingw32
 arch = i386
 os = mingw32
 system = i386, mingw32
 status = beta
 major = 2
 minor = 10.0
 year = 2009
 month = 10
 day = 14
 svn rev = 50082
 language = R
 version.string = R version 2.10.0 beta (2009-10-14 r50082)

Windows XP Professional x64 (build 3790) Service Pack 2

Locale:
LC_COLLATE=English_Australia.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_Australia.1252;LC_MONETARY=English_Australia.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_Australia.1252

Search Path:
 .GlobalEnv, package:grDevices, package:ad, package:chstuff, package:handy2, package:tweedie, package:statmod, package:handy, package:debug, package:mvbutils, mvb.session.info, package:tools, package:tcltk, package:stats, package:graphics, package:utils, package:methods, Autoloads, package:base