improving the performance of install.packages

If this is the behaviour you are looking for, you might like to try
pak (https://pak.r-lib.org)

# Create a temporary library
path <- tempfile()
dir.create(path)
.libPaths(path)

pak::pkg_install("scales")
#> ? Will install 8 packages:
#>   colorspace (1.4-1), labeling (0.3), munsell (0.5.0), R6 (2.4.0),
RColorBrewer
#>   (1.1-2), Rcpp (1.0.2), scales (1.0.0), viridisLite (0.3.0)
#>
#> ? Will download 2 CRAN packages (4.7 MB), cached: 6 (3.69 MB).
#>
#> ? Installed colorspace 1.4-1 [139ms]
#> ? Installed labeling 0.3 [206ms]
#> ? Installed munsell 0.5.0 [288ms]
#> ? Installed R6 2.4.0 [375ms]
#> ? Installed RColorBrewer 1.1-2 [423ms]
#> ? Installed Rcpp 1.0.2 [472ms]
#> ? Installed scales 1.0.0 [511ms]
#> ? Installed viridisLite 0.3.0 [569ms]
#> ? 1 + 7 pkgs | kept 0, updated 0, new 8 | downloaded 2 (4.7 MB) [2.8s]

pak::pkg_install("scales")
#> ? No changes needed
#> ? 1 + 7 pkgs | kept 7, updated 0, new 0 | downloaded 0 (0 B) [855ms]

remove.packages(c("Rcpp", "munsell"))
pak::pkg_install("scales")
#> ? Will install 2 packages:
#>   munsell (0.5.0), Rcpp (1.0.2)
#>
#> ? All 2 packages (4.88 MB) are cached.
#>
#> ? Installed munsell 0.5.0 [75ms]
#> ? Installed Rcpp 1.0.2 [242ms]
#> ? 1 + 7 pkgs | kept 6, updated 0, new 2 | downloaded 0 (0 B) [1.5s]

Hello,

Currently if you install a package twice:

install.packages("testit")
install.packages("testit")

R will build the package from source (depending on what OS you're using)
twice by default. This becomes especially burdensome when people are using
big packages (i.e. lots of depends) and someone has a script with:

install.packages("tidyverse")
...
... later on down the script
...
install.packages("dplyr")

In this case, "dplyr" is part of the tidyverse and will install twice. As
the primary "package manager" for R, it should not install a package twice
(by default) when it can be so easily checked. Indeed, many people resort
to writing a few lines of code to filter out already-installed packages An
r-help post from 2010 proposed a solution to improving the default
behavior, by adding "force=FALSE" as a api addition to install.packages.(
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2010-May/239492.html)

Would the R-core devs still consider this proposal?

Josh Bradley

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