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

[Yihui Xie]

1. I understand the efforts in those batch files, but my philosophy is
to let the users go through as less steps as they can. Since it is
possible to do it in R directly, I prefer not to download those batch
files and execute commands like R.bat CMD build or Rscript.bat file.R.
This requires extra explanations to users.

2. Yes I was fully aware of the usefulness of those batch files. I was
wishing for a direct solution.

Regards,
Yihui
--
Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
Phone: 515-294-2465 Web: http://yihui.name
Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA



On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 7:16 PM, Gabor Grothendieck
<ggrothendieck at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?
>
> --
> Statistics & Software Consulting
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>