Message-ID: <24686.21794.390884.122283@rob.eddelbuettel.com>
Date: 2021-04-08T00:58:10Z
From: Dirk Eddelbuettel
Subject: /usr/local/lib/R/site-library is not writable
In-Reply-To: <B7187B67-77A3-4306-831A-2EB3704C40E6@dcn.davis.ca.us>
Hi Gene,
"It's complicated". (Not really, but listen for a sec...)
We need to ship a default policy that makes sense for all / most
situations. So
- users cannot write into /usr/local/lib/R/site-library -- unless they are
set up to, but adding them to the 'group' that owns that directory
- root can (but ideally one should not run as root as one generally does not
now what code you might get slipped in a tar.gz); but root can enable users
- so we recommend letting (some or all) users write there by explicitly
adding them to an appropriate group.
Personally, I do not think personal libraries are a good idea on shared
machines because you can end up with a different set of package (versions)
than your colleague on the same machine. And or you running shiny from $HOME
have different packages than shiny running as server. And on and on. Other
people differ, and that is fine. If one wants personal libraries one can.
I must have explained the reasoning and fixes a dozen times each on
r-sig-debian (where you could have asked this too) and StackOverflow. At
least the latter can be searched so look at this set:
https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=user%3Ame+is%3Aanser+%2Fusr%2Flocal%2Flib%2FR%2Fsite-library
Happy to take it offline too, and who knows, we even get to meet for a coffee
one of these days.
Hope this helps, Dirk
--
https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org