[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 know there is not such a thing; that why I said "mimic" and "the
same place" ("***/R/bin" instead of "***/R/R-x.x.x/bin").

2. Yes, I never mess with the PATH variable under *nix, because R is
installed to /usr/local/bin/ (or /usr/bin/) *by default*, which is
already in the PATH variable. Otherwise extra efforts will be required
to run R as a single letter R -- this is what I wish we were able to
do under Windows.

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 Wed, May 4, 2011 at 12:55 PM, Simon Urbanek
<simon.urbanek at r-project.org> wrote:
> On May 4, 2011, at 12:00 PM, Yihui Xie wrote:
>
>> My suggestion was to mimic *nix systems: put the executable binaries in the same place *by default* (e.g. /usr/bin/ or /usr/local/bin).
>
> Except that there is not such thing on Windows! The closest to that is the "system" folder which is off limits for applications.
>
>
>> Why isn't the default bin path for R under *nix something like /usr/bin/R-2.13.0/?
>
> It is on some unices (and most system-wide installations in practice) - but that's beside the point. Unix has a well-defined FHS so regardless where you install R you can always put a symlink into /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin. Windows has no such conventions so Gabor's solution is pretty much what you claim to want (and note that in unix you're exactly running a batch script with its rhome embedded to start R!). Even on unix you don't mess with PATH to select the R version to use.
>