[R] How to upgrade R

[David Brahm]

Andy Liaw <andy_liaw at merck.com> wrote:

> What's not clear to me is a good way of keeping two versions of R
> simultaneously (for ease of transition).  Can anyone suggest a good strategy
> for doing that on *nix?

I'm not sure what you mean, but I'll tell you what we do.  We have built
/res/R/R-1.6.2, /res/R/R-1.7.1, /res/R/R-1.8.0, etc. (note we never run "make
install").  Anyone who doesn't want to upgrade (e.g. frozen production code)
just hard-codes one of those paths.  Everyone else uses a symbolic link
/res/R/R, which right now points to R-1.7.1 but will change to R-1.8.0 when we
feel we're "ready".

Just to add another layer of complication, actually we have another symbolic
link /res/R/Rdb, which I ("db") use, because I like to upgrade faster.  So Rdb
currently points to R-1.8.0.  Symbolic links are your friend.
-- 
                              -- David Brahm (brahm at alum.mit.edu)