[rkward-devel] RKWard on Windows

[Stefan Rödiger]

Am Samstag 30 Oktober 2010, 13:54:23 schrieb Thomas Friedrichsmeier:
> Hi,
> 
> > during the last days I worked with RKWard on Windows (XP). I did the
> > custom install (not the bundle). Every thing is working basically fine,
> > no crashes or such. The only thing I did not get to work so far is
> > package management (package update and installation ...). Rgui didn't
> > work in the first place too but it seems that the --internet2 flag did
> > the trick thus no problems with that any longer. Is there anything to
> > consider for RKWard regarding such issues?
> 
> not that I know of, and it works fine on my WindowsXP. This answer in the R
> windows FAQ seems to indicate that it's a known, but not really understood
> problem in R:
> http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/rw-FAQ.html#The-Internet-downloa
> d- functions-fail_002e
> I don't know whether there is any sensible way for us to work around this.
> Let me know, if you have an idea.

My current work around is to do all my installing and updating of packages via 
Rgui. As stated before after the fresh R 2.12 installation where I set the --
internet2 flag everything was working in the Rgui but still not in RKWard. 
That's all I can say to it. Sorry.

> 
> > Moreover I used to work with R.2.11 but switched to R2.12 today which
> > resulted in a non starting RKWard. I did a reinstallation of RKWard and
> > pointed to the new location of R. I did not check if the is a config file
> > which can be changed if need or such. My point is that this might be a
> > minor problem for average users. ...
> 
> I can see your point, but once again, I can't think of a solution. There
> can be an arbitrary number of independent R installations on one system,
> and these do not even need to be in the registry. RKWard needs to know
> which one to use. The "config file" for that is rkward.bat itself.
> Modifying the location of the R-executable, there, would have done the
> trick in your case.

Okay, I assumed this. That's a valuable information we can put in the RKWard 
help to make the information available without digging through the list. I 
suggest we put it in the trouble shooting section. 

> 
> Currently RKWard 0.5.4 compiled with any version of R between 2.9.x and
> 2.12.x should work with any of these versions of R at runtime. But
> sometimes there are incompatibilities, and for instance RKWard 0.5.4
> compiled with R 2.8.x cannot be used with R 2.9.x or above. Also, quite
> often, you need the latest version of RKWard in order to run the latest
> version of R. For instance, RKWard 0.5.3 cannot run any user command in
> the R Console with R >= 2.12.x.
> 
> So, I think the only safe assumption is that for a new installation of R,
> you will have to install the most recent version of RKWard. I don't see a
> good way to improve on that situation.

Well I think that's okay for the average user. As long such information is 
available no-one will have trouble to install the tiny RKWard binary.

> 
> One thing that we *can* improve is the case that the old R installation no
> longer exists. We'd simply need a check for that in rkward.bat, and then
> display a helpful message. Any volunteer for some Windows batchfile
> scripting?
> 
> Regards
> Thomas

Regards
Stefan