Duncan Murdoch wrote: ... >> Maybe I got this totally wrong. Say someone who uses Windows finds R and >> installs it via setup file. Can he/she launch the folowing without >> having Perl and/or sh.exe? >> >> R CMD script whateverOption > > No. Installing a binary package has a pure R implementation so it > doesn't need R CMD, but most of the capabilities of R CMD are not > available with a basic R install. > > There are two reasons for this. One is that the extra tools that are > needed take up a lot of space, so they would make the setup file really > huge. That's an issue of less importance these days than in the past. > > Another issue that is still important is that not all the tools needed > have licenses compatible with redistribution: in particular ActiveState > Perl and the Microsoft Help Workshop. There are other Perl > implementations, but in the past Brian Ripley found that they didn't > work. I don't know if that's still true. (In fact, I don't know if the > licenses still limit redistribution.)
OK. Thank you for this explanation. I can not live without unix shell and therefore never noticed that under Windows say R CMD INSTALL or other R CMD scripts do not work without sh.exe (and/or Perl). Gregor ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
