[Rd] Offer zip builds

[Steven Penny]

On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 6:54 PM Marc Schwartz wrote:
> I am on macOS primarily, albeit, I have run both Windows and Linux routinely
> in years past.

With all due respect, then you have no business in this thread.

> That being said, these days, I do run Windows 10 under a Parallels VM on
> macOS, as I have a single commercial application that I need to run for
> clients now and then, and it sadly only runs on a real Windows install (e.g.
> not with Wine).

Further demonstrating my point. You run Windows in a virtual machine, meaning
even if you encountered some bad installer, you could just revert to a snapshot
or similar.

> To your points:
>
> [bunch of links]

I am sorry if I miscommunicated, I didnt and dont wish to be convinced about how
well behaved R installer is. I wish for R to offer zip builds. Many other
programming languages do:

- http://strawberryperl.com/releases.html
- https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet-core/2.2
- https://golang.org/dl
- https://nim-lang.org/install_windows.html
- https://python.org/downloads/release/python-373
- https://windows.php.net/download

As I see it, the question isnt "should R offer zip builds", its "why isnt R
offering zip builds".

> Unless you can make the case to them to expend the finite resources that they
> have to support this as part of each version release process, in light of the
> prior discussions, it is not clear that this appears to be a priority.

Thats the point of my original post. If they choose to continue with only EXE,
I will just keep using other programming languages. So you could see how it
might be in R interest to offer this, as no zip builds might be one of the
reasons people avoid the language.