[R] How to upgrade R

[Liaw, Andy]

It's actually easier than I thought (and perhaps than you described).  What
Prof. Ripley suggested, combined with the options to the configure script,
should make this fairly straight-forward, even with "make install".

Cheers,
Andy

> From: David Brahm [mailto:brahm at alum.mit.edu] 
> 
> 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)
>