Updata aliases manually

[EllaKaye]

Hello. Since the release of R 4.4, I have run rig add release and rig add devel to install R 4.4 and 4.5 respectively. That works fine, but I'm stuck with the alias oldrel attached to R 4.2. How can I swap that alias so that it now attaches to R 4.3? I tried running rig system make-links but that didn't change anything.

I had previously installed R 4.4 when it was the devel version, so, after running rig add release when R 4.4 was officially released, for a while I had the aliases release and devel both applied to R 4.4, which seemed weird, although that was resolved when I later ran rig add devel.

I haven't tried running rig add oldrel as it doesn't seem right to add a version that I already have, but maybe that's the way to go? If so, it would be nice if that was documented somewhere.

As a feature request, it might be nice if, on running rig add release the alias oldrel automatically gets reassigned to the previous release.

[gaborcsardi]

We'll planning on having a more complete alias support, but currently indeed the only way is to (re)install a version that corresponds to that alias.

This is by design, so that if you do rig add oldrel, that version is continued to be called oldrel until you explicitly change the alias (will be possible in the future), or install a different R version that gets the oldrel alias.

[EllaKaye]

Hi @gaborcsardi. Thanks for clarifying. I can see that it is probably best to make changing aliases explicit, so it's nice to know that that functionality is planned for the future.

Happy for you to close this issue now, or else leave it open until the alias support is added - as you wish :)