From ggrothendieck at gmail.com  Sat Dec  6 14:14:27 2008
From: ggrothendieck at gmail.com (Gabor Grothendieck)
Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2008 08:14:27 -0500
Subject: [Rd] Error in R CMD INSTALL on Windows XP using Rtools28
In-Reply-To: <493A7932.3030408@stats.uwo.ca>
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Message-ID: <971536df0812060514r2b2e6e5bi828bab85b786e8a8@mail.gmail.com>

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.



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