[R-SIG-Mac] RSwitch - making it easier to test pre-release versions of R

[Kasper Daniel Hansen]

I have now played around a little with Rswitch, and I think it is a  
great idea. It makes it very easy to test packages in the devel  
version of R (which I am doing right now :).

It seems to be very close to be extremely useable for us package  
developers, but I have some questions/suggestions below.

Perhaps a use case is in order: generally I am less interested in  
older versions of R (but I applaud you for making it very easy to  
keep those around), I am however interested in having easy access to  
the following
  * The current devel version, since that is almost a requirement to  
be on the bleeding BioC edge
  * The release candidate when the R update time is nearing. In a way  
I guess that is the same as the release candidate, but there seems to  
be a release candidate as well as a devel version on Simon's R page  
(I assume that the devel version there is the stuff that is going to  
be either R-2.4.1 or R.2.5.0)

Now to the comments:

* If I have a running R session, will this session be affected by  
switching the symlink?
* I think it would be quite valuable to have a Versions hierarchy  
inside ~/Library/R
* Would it be easy to have Rswitch report some more specifics on the  
R-version, at least for the "devel" version, right now all I see is  
2.4, whereas R --version reports something like R-2.4.0 alpha (date,  
revision).
* Perhaps it would make sense to have the versions in the R.framework  
be x.y.z instead of now where they are x.y. And perhaps even allow  
for something R-devel, R-alpha, R-patched? I have no idea whether  
that would be easy or feasible.

On a grander scale it might be extremely worthwhile to make this app  
into a menu bar thing, with the ability to pull down the newest devel  
version. That at least would make life even easier for someone like me.

Thanks for the effort, Kasper


On Sep 13, 2006, at 1:37 PM, Simon Urbanek wrote:

>
> On Sep 13, 2006, at 11:25 AM, stefano iacus wrote:
>
>> We discussed this in the past and now you remind me the point with
>> the announcement of this nice utility.
>> I know it can be for this release (I'm just writing it here as a
>> memo) but this might be considered as a feature request:
>>
>> it would be nice to include RSwitch inside R.app with a panel
>> showing which versions of the Framework are compatible with the
>> particular version of R.app currently running (probably not too
>> much variability though).
>
> Technically, none. A R.app is always linked to a specific version of
> the framework, so it won't work with any other version. In practice,
> it might if the R API didn't change too much, but that is not
> guaranteed. (Framework version = X.Y part of the X.Y.Z R version, so
> patch releases are compatible, but they are installed in the same
> location, so you cannot have multiple patch-revisions of R in
> Versions unless you do that manually).
>
> Actually, for R 2.4 and higher started through the R.app GUI, it's
> not really an issue, because the GUI now automatically sets version-
> specific R_HOME, so you can have two R.apps - one to start R 2.4 and
> one to start R 2.5 and they both ignore the currently set version
> (and can run in parallel). The "Current" symlink applies mainly to R
> started from the command line and pre-2.4 versions of R.
>
>
>> The selected version would be used at next start of R.app (like
>> when you choose OS X system disk for next boot) and of course a
>> "restart now" button would be nice as well.
>>
>
> The only way (I can think of) to provide a solution would be to put
> the actual R.app binary inside the R framework and let the user-
> visible R.app be just a wrapper that launches the correct R.app from
> a framework. However, this doesn't sound quite right, because it
> would involve two R.apps launching each other and what the user sees
> is not what s/he gets ....
>
>
>> The restart button is something I really miss in daily use,
>> independently from the above feature request.
>>
>
> That is not trivial (short of writing a wrapper), because R
> termination is handled by libR itself and not the R.app. We may want
> to dig into that, though, because currently q("yes") will close R.app
> without saving any open editor windows, because R.app doesn't even
> get the message that R is closing, so it doesn't have the chance to
> save anything - and we should definitely fix that ...
>
> Cheers,
> Simon
>
>
>> On 14/set/06, at 00:04, Simon Urbanek wrote:
>>
>>> In case you didn't know it is possible to have multiple R versions
>>> installed on your Mac. The R framework uses a versioning system that
>>> can keep multiple R versions in parallel at /Library/Frameworks/
>>> R.framework/Versions
>>> You can change the current version by setting the "Current" symlink
>>> there. For those as lazy as me there is now a small GUI tool now
>>> available at
>>> http://r.research.att.com/
>>> (on the bottom) which I call RSwitch and it allows you to change the
>>> current R version in one click. Since we are getting close to the
>>> beta stage of the next release, the best use of it is once you
>>> install the current alpha/beta version of R to switch between the
>>> pre-
>>> release and your old R version as necessary.
>>>
>>> Note: even if you switch the current R version, you will still need
>>> to use the corresponding version of the GUI as well, otherwise
>>> strange things will happen. Switching versions while R is running  
>>> can
>>> also have undesirable effects if you try to load packages after the
>>> change as they will be loaded from the wrong version of R, so use
>>> with care.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Simon
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> R-SIG-Mac mailing list
>>> R-SIG-Mac at stat.math.ethz.ch
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
>>
>>
>
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