There's a nice packaging thing you do...
On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Paul Johnson <pauljohn32 at gmail.com> wrote:
Hello, Dirk (and everybody): I have Ubuntu on some systems and I notice there's a very nice thing you do with your R packages. ?The system is setup so that packages installed from deb go into /usr/lib/R, while packages built from scratch by root go into /usr/local/.., and if the user runs install.packages(), then it gets dumped into the user's own account. I'm much more familiar with RedHat/Fedora systems, and they don't have that approach built in. ?I've not tried to install a package on an RPM based system as an ordinary user lately, but in the old days it failed because user's can't write in /usr/lib. ?I am certain the RPM based systems don't segregate packages installed from RPM and built by root with install.packages.
Interesting that you bring this up. I can confirm this (lack of) behavior on RedHat atleast.
From the *NEW FEATURES* section under *CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.5.0* of
http://www.cran.r-project.org/src/base/NEWS If 'lib' is not specified or is specified of length one and the chosen location is not a writable directory, install.packages() offers to create a personal library directory for you if one does not already exist, and to install there. If I understand correctly, this "feature" is not an artifact of a distribution specific packaging. It irks me how an rpm installation (I can talk of RedHat 5.4 only) blatantly ignores this, even to this day (R 2.10.0)! And I fail to understand how/why, especially when R_LIBS_USER is very specifically hardcoded in /usr/lib64/R/etc/Renviron (for x86_64)!!! (Anyway, this is not the appropriate list for discussing any solution.)
Prasenjit