[Rd] Error in R CMD INSTALL on Windows XP using Rtools28

[cstrato]

Dear Duncan, dear Gabor,

Thank you for this additional information and all these great tips.

Setting the system path in the following way solved my problem:
c:\Rtools\bin;c:\Rtools\perl\bin;c:\Rtools\MinGW\bin;%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;c:\Programme\Microsoft 
SQL Server\90\Tools\binn\

Luckily this solves also the problem with potential conflicts between R 
tools, Microsoft tools and ROOT, so that I do not have to rename any 
tools (which I would be reluctant to do).

Since at the moment everything seems to work fine, and I am no Windows 
expert (I do all my development on my Mac), I will keep the current 
setting, however, the next time I have to set up everything, I will try 
to take advantage of Rcmd.bat since Gabor mentions that it will not 
override any of my settings.

Regarding the R installation documentation, I understand now that this 
seems to be a problem of my complicated setup and not a general problem, 
so adding this information may confuse other people.

Best regards
Christian


Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 8:08 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
>   
>> cstrato wrote:
>>     
>>> Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>>>
>>>       
>>>> On Fri, 5 Dec 2008, cstrato wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>         
>>>>> Dear Duncan
>>>>>
>>>>> Thank you for this explicit explanation, you are right:
>>>>>
>>>>> When setting the system variable "Path" (as administrator) in addition
>>>>> to setting the user variable "PATH" (as user), now everything works fine.
>>>>>
>>>>> Interestingly, setting the system variable "Path" on my laptop with
>>>>> Rtools27 seems not to be necessary.
>>>>>
>>>>> May I suggest that  this could be clarified in "R Installation and
>>>>> Administration" since there only the user variable "PATH" is mentioned (as
>>>>> far as I see).
>>>>>
>>>>>           
>>>> In a shell there is only one PATH, so the manual is correct.
>>>>
>>>>         
>>> I did not say that the manual is not correct, I only suggested to clarify
>>> the issue, since when running R CMD INSTALL from the Command Console I need
>>> to set also the system variable "Path".
>>>
>>>       
>> I'd be reluctant to do this, for the same reason Brian was:  the
>> documentation is correct.  You need to set the PATH environment variable
>> correctly, and that's what we say.  The fact that doing this is complicated
>> and confusing on Windows is a problem with the Windows design and
>> documentation, not the R documentation, and Microsoft certainly has more
>> resources than we do to address it.  What was their response when you asked
>> them to improve their documentation?
>> Duncan Murdoch
>>
>>     
>
> The http://batchfiles.googlecode.com home page does give some tips for setting
> paths just in case.  Of course if you are using the batchfiles you
> won't have to set
> any paths in the first place.
>
>
>