On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 5:40 PM Steven Penny <svnp...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Theres nothing nefarious here. It would allow people to use the R environment > without running an installer. If someone is a new user they may want to try > R out, and installers can be invasive as they commonly: > > - copy files to install dir > - copy files to profile dir > - set registry entries > - set environment variables > - set start menu entries > > and historically uninstallers have a bad record of reverting these changes. > should not put this burden upon new users or even having them resort to > virtual > machine to avoid items above. having a ZIP file allows new users to run the > R environment, then if they like it perhaps they can run the installer going > forward.
This is a valid suggestion, but probably impossible to do reliably. Most installers (the R one is completely open source btw) perform those steps for a reason. It is great if software can be installed simply by extracting a zip file somewhere, but if this is what you desire, you're using the wrong operating system. We only offer official installation options that work 100% reliably and I don't think this can be accomplished with a zip file. For example a zip file won't be able to set the installation location in the registry, and hence other software such as RStudio won't be able to find the R installation. Also a zip installation might mix up package libraries from different R versions (which is bad), or users might expect they can upgrade R by overwriting their installation with a new zip (also bad). Hence I'm afraid offering such alternative installation options would open a new can of worms with bug reports from Windows users with broken installations, or packages that don't work as expected. As for alternatives, 'rportable' and 'innoextract' have already been mentioned if you really just want to dump the files from the installer, if that works for you. Another popular option to install (any) Windows software without manually running installers is using chocolatey, for example: choco install miktex choco install r.project This will still indirectly use official installers, but the installers have been verified as "safe" by external folks and the installation is completely automated. Perhaps that's another compromise you could live with. ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel