[Rd] Wishlist: write R's bin path to the PATH variable and remove the version string in the installation dir under Windows

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 7:44 PM, Yihui Xie <xie at yihui.name> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I guess this issue must have been brought forward long time ago, but I
> still hope you can consider under Windows (during installation):
>
> 1. put R's bin path in the PATH variable of the system so that we can
> use the commands "R" and "Rscript" more easily;
>
> 2. remove the version string like R-2.13.0 in the default installation
> directory, e.g. only use a directory like C:/Program Files/R/ instead
> of C:/Program Files/R/R-2.13.0/; I know many people just follow the
> default setting when installing R, and this version string will often
> lead to many (unnecessary) copies of R in the system and brings
> difficulty to the first issue (several possible bin directories);
>
> I'm aware of some existing efforts in overcoming the difficulty of
> calling R under Windows like the R batch files project
> (http://code.google.com/p/batchfiles/), but I believe this is better
> to be solved in R directly.
>

The above seems very awkward. If you want to do it temporarily each
time you use R its going to be MUCH slower than using batch files
since you will have to start up R and then run an R program.  To do it
permanently implies mucking with  your system settings and leaving it
in a changed state and that seems worse than the batch file approach
which requires no such permanent change.  Your (2) is unnecessary
using the batch files since they automatically find R regardless of
what you name the directory.  In other situations if you want to set
the path using R you already need to know the path to R in order to
run R in the first place and if you know the path to R in order to run
it why do you need to set the path?

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