[Rd] R 3.0, Rtools3.0,l Windows7 64-bit, and permission agony

Duncan Murdoch murdoch.duncan at gmail.com
Sat Apr 20 19:54:41 CEST 2013


On 13-04-20 12:30 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 11:49 AM, Duncan Murdoch
> <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 13-04-20 11:09 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 10:45 AM, Hadley Wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Just curious:  how often do you use the Windows find command?  We have
>>>>>> put
>>>>>> instructions in place for people to run the install process with a
>>>>>> renamed
>>>>>> Rtools find command (which I think is the only conflict). The issue is
>>>>>> that
>>>>>> more users who want to use the command line commands are familiar with
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> Unix variant (which came first, by the way) than the Windows one, so
>>>>>> renaming the Rtools one would cause trouble for more people.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Its not just find - its also sort. And really R has no business
>>>>> clobbering built in Windows commands. This is just wrong and really
>>>>> causes anyone who does any significant amount of Windows batch
>>>>> programming (or uses batch programs of any complexity) endless
>>>>> problems.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Which is presumably why Rtools doesn't modify the path by default.
>>>>
>>>> Better solutions (e.g. Rstudio and devtools) temporarily set the path
>>>> on when you're calling R CMD *.
>>>
>>>
>>> I am well aware of the various kludges to address this including my
>>> own batchfiles ( http://batchfiles.googlecode.com ) which handles this
>>> by temporarily changing the path as well; however, the real problem is
>>> that Rtools does not play nice with Windows and that needs to be
>>> addressed directly.
>>
>>
>> It has been.  You ignored it.
>>
>> Duncan Murdoch
>>
>
> If some change to address this has been made that would be great but
> there is no mention of it on the Rtools page in the change history
> section (the only documented change relates to the png/tiff/jpeg
> libraries), there was no announcement that I saw and Rtools\bin still
> contains find and sort so what specifically is the change?

It's not a change to Rtools, it's a change is to the build system in R: 
  it allows you to rename sort or find in your own copy of Rtools, and R 
will use whatever you specify.  You were informed of this when I did it 
in 2007, and I've mentioned it when the topic comes up here, most 
recently in the message quoted above.  That's a long time ago, so I 
don't remember if you tried it then, but I've never heard a complaint 
from anyone else that it doesn't work.

Duncan Murdoch



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