R-beta: Re: R-alpha: windows advice

[Luke Tierney]

> 
> Start Up
> ========
> Second, under Unix we have a Rprofile in the library directory but users
> can also have their own Rprofile files in different directories. Since
> R is not launched from a command line it seems hard to arrange this
> under windows.
> If an image gets saved I was planning to link it (via a double click) to 
> the R.exe and in that instance I could look around for a Rprofile in the
> same directory.
> Any other ideas/suggestions?
> Does anyone know how Word/Excel/...  handle user preferences?

Win 3.1 used to use .ini files, traditionally stored in the windows
system directory. I believe, though I'm not certain, that putting .ini
files in the system directory is no longer allowed under Windows 95
guidelines (the seal of approval business -- it is entirely possible
that this is true but MS violates it in its own products). NT
encourages the use of the Registry database. REGEDIT lets you look at
the registry database.

I sometimes find it useful to poke around on MS's site for info on
things like this.  Searching on ".ini files" at
http://www.microsoft.com/Search/ got me some entries including

http://www.microsoft.com/msdn/sdk/platforms/doc/sdk/protech/src/cc5port_23.htm

which points to GetProfileString, whose entry describes how it is
interpreted on different platforms and different registry settings.

NT actually supports the notion of separate users, but I haven't
figured out how this is supposed to be used from a program. The
article

	http://www.microsoft.com/kb/articles/q101/5/07.htm

-- apparently there are HOMEDRIVE and HOMEPATH environment variables.

An article I found searching for "temporary",

http://www.microsoft.com/msdn/sdk/platforms/doc/sdk/win32/sys/src/filesio_24.htm

suggests using GetTempPath and GetTempFileName. It might be worth
double checking that these are available under Win32s -- I think they
probably are, but I haven't checked.


luke
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