[Rd] testing a Windows custom installer

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 20/07/2011 10:29 AM, John Fox wrote:
> Dear R-devel list members,
>
> For several years, I've created a custom R installer for my students who use
> Windows. When I test the installer on my own Windows machines, selections in
> the installation dialogs reflect my previous choices, which I suppose are
> saved in the Windows registry.
>
> I'd like to be able to see what a student who has never installed R before
> will see, to verify that an installation that takes all defaults in the
> custom installer produces the desired result. In the past, I've dealt with
> this problem by finding a Windows machine on which R has never been
> installed, but that's inconvenient (and, as R proliferates will, I hope,
> become impossible!). Is there a better approach?

The settings are saved to the registry by the installer, Inno Setup, and 
restored automatically (for most of them), or using its 
"GetPreviousData" function (for the R specific ones).  I don't think 
there is a way to tell the installer to ignore the previous data, but 
there might be.

I believe if you uninstall R then the settings will be forgotten, 
because the settings are saved in locations like

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\R 
for Windows 2.13.0_is1 in string values named
"Inno Setup: *" for the ones used internally, and "Inno Setup Codefile: 
*" for the ones specific to R.

It's probably okay to delete that whole key and then it will forget the 
old settings, but that seems risky.

There's a command line option to the installer called "/SAVEINF" which 
saves the settings to a file and "/LOADINF" which loads them from a 
file, but I don't see how to tell it to just ignore the registry settings.

Duncan Murdoch