Launching R from OSGeo4W shell (Windows)

[florisvdh]

Since OSGeo4W version 2, we are missing the former feature of being able to launch R from the OSGeo4W shell by just typing R (or R GUI to open a separate R console window). This was a great feature to Windows users of the R package rgrass.

It is due to the fact that the rbatch directory is missing in OSGeo4W/apps/; it was present in version 1 but not in version 2.

@jef-n could you bundle rbatch in version 2 please? This would bring GRASS in OSGeo4W on par with standalone GRASS. The latter has always bundled rbatch, allowing to launch R without needing the filepath to the program.

The source code is at https://github.com/OSGeo/grass/tree/main/mswindows/external/rbatch. Also pinging @hellik.

[jef-n]

The files are in apps/grass/grass*/bin/

[florisvdh]

Yep; indeed this means that R can be launched from within a GRASS OSGeo4W session.

However we'd like to also have R available standalone inside OSGeo4W shell, as it worked in OSGeo4W version 1, i.e. typing R in the OSGeo4W shell.

This is a second important use case we know from our winGRASS users.

It would allow to access GRASS GIS (and other OSGeo4W tools) from R only when you need it. The environment variables for e.g. GDAL, PROJ etc. are then set for use out of the box in R.

How should we proceed?