From ggrothendieck at gmail.com  Wed Apr  6 14:16:28 2011
From: ggrothendieck at gmail.com (Gabor Grothendieck)
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2011 08:16:28 -0400
Subject: [Rd] Rtools questions
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On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 7:54 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11-04-05 7:51 PM, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 3:44 PM, Duncan Murdoch<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>
>> ?wrote:
>>> On 11-04-05 6:22 PM, Spencer Graves wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hello:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ? ? ? ? 1. ?How can I tell when the development version of Rtools has
>>>> changed?
>>>
>>> I don't make announcements of the changes, you just need to check the web
>>> site. ?There are online tools that can do this for you automatically, but
>>> I
>>> don't know which one to recommend. ?Google suggests lots of them.
>>
>> I also asked myself this before and I must admit it took me a while to
>> interpret the contents of the webpage. ?There are multiple sections,
>> e.g. 'Changes since R 2.12.2', 'Changes since R 2.11.1', 'Changes
>> since R 2.11.0', and so on. ?Then within each section there are some
>> dates mentioned. ?Given my current R version (say R 2.13.0 beta) and
>> Rtools (Rtools213.exe), it not fully clear to me which section to look
>> at, e.g. 'Changes since R 2.12.2'?
>
> Well, that depends on when you downloaded it. ?I use the R version releases
> as bookmarks. ?If you last downloaded Rtools after the release of R 2.12.2,
> then you only need to look at the last section.
>
> The problem with collecting changes into those that apply to each Rtools
> version is just that the change lists would be longer: ?Rtools212 will get
> changes through several R releases. ?When there are compiler changes,
> RtoolsXYZ generally comes out during the previous R version, because the
> compiler may only work with the R-devel version. ?For instance, Rtools212
> was introduced between R 2.11.0 and 2.11.1 and was updated a number of times
> up to quite recently. ?(It is now frozen, so if you download it now and are
> working with the R versions it supports you never need to worry about
> updates to it.)
>
> However, if you want to reformat the page, go ahead, and send me the new
> version. ?It's a hand edited HTML page so I'd be happy to incorporate
> changes that make it more readable, as long as it's still easy to edit by
> hand.
>
> Gabor asked how to know which version was downloaded. ?If you have the
> installer file you can tell: ?right click on it, choose Properties, look at
> the Version tab. ?If you didn't keep the installer, I don't know a way to
> find out, but it might be recorded in the unins000.dat file that the
> uninstaller uses. ?Of course, without downloading the new one you can't find
> out its version: ?so back to my original suggestion to monitor changes to
> the web page. ?I'll see if there's a way to automatically include the
> revision number in the filename.

The situation is that you have several versions of Rtools installers
and have experimented with several of them to see which one seems to
work and now can't remember which one you installed.  If you keep
multiple versions of R as many people do this is particularly
problematic.

Using strings on unins000.dat did not reveal anything although there
was so much text it would be easy to miss.

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[Rd] Rtools questions
Gabor Grothendieck