There's a nice packaging thing you do...

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.

Am I correct in my "detective work" that your package is making
changes to the Renviron file to make this happen?  Are there other
changes as well?  I'd like to do the same to an RPM setup.

I found myself wondering if this setup should be suggested to the R
distribution itself?

pj

Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas