On 1/14/2008 6:25 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:> Recently I have heard reports like the one below a couple of times:
>
> Tineke Casneuf wrote:
>> However I did encouter an error when trying to install a self-made
dummy
>> package. I am sure it is not due to the package because it can be build
on
>> someone else's windows PC.
>>
>> The error message is *rm: failed to get attributes of `/': No such
file or
>> directory.
> Today I saw one live, and managed to track down the problem. Cygwin
> (from which the Windows R toolset gets a number of utilities), stores
> information on its mounts in the Windows registry. If you later
> uninstall it but leave the registry entries in place, you'll get an
> error like the above. The rm utility thinks that "/" refers to a
> directory like c:\cygwin, but such a directory doesn't exist.
>
> I don't know if this is a bug in the Cygwin uninstaller (which I would
> say should remove registry entries once they are no longer valid), in rm
> (which should ignore mounts that don't make sense), or if it is user
> error. But the fix is quite simple: look in the registry (under
> HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Cygnus Solutions\Cygwin\mounts v2, or the
> same location in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE), and remove any invalid mounts.
>
> I will modify the Rtools installer to work around this problem.
This is now in place. I also added the ability to manually edit the
PATH, in case you don't like the automatic edits.
Hopefully I didn't introduce any new bugs at the same time.
Duncan Murdoch