[Rd] Versioning Rtools ARP entries

[Tomas Kalibera]

On 3/13/23 17:31, Daniel Possenriede wrote:
> Hi,
>
> If I am not mistaken, all Rtools 4.2 (and 4.3) revisions have the same
> ARP [1] entries, i.e. all report version 4.2.0.1 (or 4.3.0.1). This
> makes it difficult to determine the installed version (is it possible
> to determine the installed revision?) and impossible for tools like
> winget [2] to update Rtools to the latest revision, AFAICT.
>
> Would it be possible to track the version in the installer [3] for
> future Rtools releases again, like it used to be in Rtools 4.0 [4]?

Well the thing is that once you install Rtools 42/43, you can then 
upgrade it internally (without Windows knowing). You can upgrade the 
Msys2 part, or the MXE part, or both. The MXE part (customized for 
Rtools) does have a single version number, which can be found in the 
installation. The Msys2 part doesn't, afaik.

See e.g. "Upgrading Rtools43" in 
https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/howto-R-devel.html for how 
to upgrade and how to find out the current version number of the MXE part.

So, right, I could e.g. add a non-decreasing unique version to the build 
of the installer (e.g. based on that from the SVN where it lives and the 
MXE part version originally included), but I doubt how useful that would 
be, given that a particular installation can be upgraded/modified by the 
user. It could actually be misleading.

Note Rtools40 also could be updated by the user internally.

Tomas

>
> Thanks!
>
> Daniel
>
> [1] https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs/blob/master/FAQ.md#what-is-an-arp-entry
> [2] https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli
> [3] https://svn.r-project.org/R-dev-web/trunk/WindowsBuilds/winutf8/ucrt3/rtools/rtools64.iss
> [4] https://github.com/r-windows/rtools-installer/commit/7f23f0d0442d72922014ec4082c8bdd437364cef
>
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