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(PR#9691) 'Bug'#424696: R CMD INSTALL -l <path> does not

I looked for evidence that this is supposed to happen, as it was news to 
me that it did on some versions of R.  Possible sources of documentation 
seem to be

R CMD INSTALL --help
?INSTALL
R-intro.texi, R-exts.texi, R-admin.texi

none of which mention this AFAICS, and all seem to be written assuming an 
existing library tree.

DId you find something to suggest otherwise?  Clearly no alpha/beta 
tester expected this to work.

I am not at all sure this would be desirable.  It seems that specifying a 
non-existent library tree would most likely be a typing error, and 
silently creating it would lead to some puzzling errors.  (In fact, I now 
suspect that this has happened to me in the past.)

I've added some much more specific error messages.
On Wed, 16 May 2007, edd at debian.org wrote:

            
Yes, but changes in undocumented behaviour are allowed, especially if no 
one knows about them.