Rcgi - running R over the web
=============================

You may find reading other files more appropriate:
   CHANGES  documents differences between versions of Rcgi
   INSTALL  gives installation instructions
   README   details the licence that Rcgi is released under
   HOWTO    is a web-author's guide to using Rcgi

This file was last changed with release 1e of Rcgi.

INSTALLATION
============

Installation should be straightforward.  You need the
following software:
                             Tested version(s)
 - R                         0.62.3 and 0.62.4 to 1.2.0
 - A HTTP daemon             Apache 1.3.x on Linux and FBSD
 - Perl 5 or later+CGI.pm    5.004 to 5.6
 - Ghostscript               3.33 to 5.10
 - netpbm (ppmtogif)         1 March 1994
 - gzip (and zcat)           1.2.4

I warn you that Rcgi ran happily on my old P133/16M Linux
machine, but becomes very slow when doing PS to GIF
conversions.  It needs more pages before our P200/96M
machine slows down.  Just running the main Rcgi is OK, though.

Additionally, I assume that you:
 - can run CGI processes (use ScriptAlias in Apache)
 - have an alias /Rdoc/ to the root of the R library tree
    (the folder that contains the "doc" folder, usually
    /usr/local/lib/R or similar)
    
You then need to:
1. Choose your installation directory.
2. Make a directory for Rcgi's output.  The user running the 
    CGI script must be able to write to it.  Consider having a 
    cron job clean this directory at regular intervals.
3. Type 
  make INSTALLDIR=/path/to/cgi/dir TEMPDIR=/path/to/output/dir
4. Load the URL where go lives and test it out.

Please report all errors in the above instructions to
rcgi@coollist.com - I do not think there are any, but I don't
want there to be any.


SUPPORT
=======

When Rcgi is run, it returns a reference number in the output.
The part before the colon is the process ID, which is used to
name the output files in the temporary directory.  The part
after the colon is the date and time in the form
YYYYMMDDhhmmss so that you can track down the request in the
HTTP server logs.

There is a mailing list for Rcgi!  To join, go to coollist.com 
and subscribe to the rcgi list.  As I write this, it's very
quiet, but I'd love to hear what you are using Rcgi for.
I will do my best to follow good practice and revise the
system in light of comments.  Any bug fixes will be welcomed.
Please email them to the list.

Additionally, should the worst happen and the rcgi list 
vanishes, the author also watches several R and statistics 
lists, so it shouldn't be too hard to track him down.
