Dear Duncan, First, thanks to Duncan and others for addressing my question.
In light of Duncan's remarks, I've arrived at the following procedure, which seems to work: (1) Install R using my custom installer. (2) Uninstall the newly installed R. This clears the registry but leaves my other installed versions of R undisturbed. (3) Reinstall R using the custom installer. BTW, following this procedure, I found that an option in the installer that wasn't set the way I want and was able to fix it. Best, John > -----Original Message----- > From: Duncan Murdoch [mailto:murdoch.dun...@gmail.com] > Sent: July-20-11 10:57 AM > To: John Fox > Cc: R-devel@r-project.org > Subject: Re: [Rd] testing a Windows custom installer > > On 20/07/2011 10:29 AM, John Fox wrote: > > Dear R-devel list members, > > > > For several years, I've created a custom R installer for my students > > who use Windows. When I test the installer on my own Windows machines, > > selections in the installation dialogs reflect my previous choices, > > which I suppose are saved in the Windows registry. > > > > I'd like to be able to see what a student who has never installed R > > before will see, to verify that an installation that takes all > > defaults in the custom installer produces the desired result. In the > > past, I've dealt with this problem by finding a Windows machine on > > which R has never been installed, but that's inconvenient (and, as R > > proliferates will, I hope, become impossible!). Is there a better > approach? > > The settings are saved to the registry by the installer, Inno Setup, and > restored automatically (for most of them), or using its > "GetPreviousData" function (for the R specific ones). I don't think > there is a way to tell the installer to ignore the previous data, but > there might be. > > I believe if you uninstall R then the settings will be forgotten, > because the settings are saved in locations like > > HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\R > for Windows 2.13.0_is1 in string values named "Inno Setup: *" for the > ones used internally, and "Inno Setup Codefile: > *" for the ones specific to R. > > It's probably okay to delete that whole key and then it will forget the > old settings, but that seems risky. > > There's a command line option to the installer called "/SAVEINF" which > saves the settings to a file and "/LOADINF" which loads them from a > file, but I don't see how to tell it to just ignore the registry > settings. > > Duncan Murdoch ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel