[Rd] Rtools questions

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 11-04-06 2:45 PM, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 4:54 AM, Duncan Murdoch<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On 11-04-05 7:51 PM, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
>>> On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 3:44 PM, Duncan Murdoch<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>
>>>   wrote:
>>>> On 11-04-05 6:22 PM, Spencer Graves wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Hello:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>          1.  How can I tell when the development version of Rtools has
>>>>> changed?
>>>>
>>>> I don't make announcements of the changes, you just need to check the web
>>>> site.  There are online tools that can do this for you automatically, but
>>>> I
>>>> don't know which one to recommend.  Google suggests lots of them.
>>>
>>> I also asked myself this before and I must admit it took me a while to
>>> interpret the contents of the webpage.  There are multiple sections,
>>> e.g. 'Changes since R 2.12.2', 'Changes since R 2.11.1', 'Changes
>>> since R 2.11.0', and so on.  Then within each section there are some
>>> dates mentioned.  Given my current R version (say R 2.13.0 beta) and
>>> Rtools (Rtools213.exe), it not fully clear to me which section to look
>>> at, e.g. 'Changes since R 2.12.2'?
>>
>> Well, that depends on when you downloaded it.  I use the R version releases
>> as bookmarks.  If you last downloaded Rtools after the release of R 2.12.2,
>> then you only need to look at the last section.
>>
>> The problem with collecting changes into those that apply to each Rtools
>> version is just that the change lists would be longer:  Rtools212 will get
>> changes through several R releases.  When there are compiler changes,
>> RtoolsXYZ generally comes out during the previous R version, because the
>> compiler may only work with the R-devel version.  For instance, Rtools212
>> was introduced between R 2.11.0 and 2.11.1 and was updated a number of times
>> up to quite recently.  (It is now frozen, so if you download it now and are
>> working with the R versions it supports you never need to worry about
>> updates to it.)
>
> I understand, and I suspected this was the reason too.
>
>>
>> However, if you want to reformat the page, go ahead, and send me the new
>> version.  It's a hand edited HTML page so I'd be happy to incorporate
>> changes that make it more readable, as long as it's still easy to edit by
>> hand.
>>
>> Gabor asked how to know which version was downloaded.  If you have the
>> installer file you can tell:  right click on it, choose Properties, look at
>> the Version tab.  If you didn't keep the installer, I don't know a way to
>> find out, but it might be recorded in the unins000.dat file that the
>> uninstaller uses.  Of course, without downloading the new one you can't find
>> out its version:  so back to my original suggestion to monitor changes to
>> the web page.  I'll see if there's a way to automatically include the
>> revision number in the filename.
>
> This is useful - I didn't know about this version number of InnoSetup.
>   I've browsed the online InnoSetup help, but I couldn't locate what
> the version parameter is called.  With it, would it be possible to use
> a [Code] block having InnoSetup write the version number to a VERSION
> file in the Rtools installation directory?  That would make it
> possible to compare what's online and what's installed.
>
> Another alternative for figuring out if Rtools have changed would be
> to compare the timestamp of the installed Rtools directory (because
> you typically install immediately after download) and the
> Rtools213.exe timestamp on the web server.  This could be achieved by
> moving the files to, say,
> http://www.murdoch-sutherland.com/Rtools/download/ and enable indexing
> of files in that directory.
>
> Either way, know about the version number is certainly good enough for
> me.  After installing Rtools, I can simply put the installer file in
> the Rtools directory to allow me to compare to it later. (I kind of
> did this before by comparing file sizes.)

I've just uploaded a small change:  now Rtools.txt records the version 
number (and if I remember to update it, you can download only that file 
to see if you are up to date).  There's also a VERSION.txt file that 
contains the version number, which is likely to maintain its format more 
consistently, so if you want an automatic check, you should look at that 
file.  It's also on the web site.

Duncan Murdoch