Regarding R_LIBS_USER
Hello, I just subscribed to the list to join the discussion after being blindsided by the change and reading Dirk Eddelbuettel's reply to my bug report at https://bugs.debian.org/866768 . As far as I can tell the advantages of site library are: 1. Saves disk space and a little bit of user time spent installing and upgrading. 2. Other Debian package manages, like pip, default?to trying to install to a site library. However, it seems to me that the case for status quo ante is stronger, even if the jarring behaviour (asking user whether to create a personal directory, then failing to do so) is fixed: 1. Correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't the change make the default behaviour of R on Debian different from its default behaviour on other distributions? 2. Site library has no benefit over user library on a single-user system. 3. Making the site library writeable by default is a severe security vulnerability, since it enables users to rewrite library code that will be blindly executed by other users on the system. 4. Making the site library not-writeable by default means that users relying on site library need to contact an administrator to get a package installed or upgraded. This seems to me to largely defeat the benefit of a site library for most systems, since most users aren't so patient and would just figure out how to use a user library. 5. The use case where defaulting to installing to site library is most beneficial---a system shared by few trusted users---is rare compared to the single-user and the many-untrusted-user systems. 6. There are workarounds, and, indeed, users can always use user libraries, but the new setup puts the burden of tweaking the system on the *least skilled* users, whereas the old setup Just Worked for them (since R 2.5.0). 7. Even in Python and others, the user library takes precedence over the site library (which, in turn, takes precedence over the dpkg- installed library). This means that .libPaths() should have the user library (if it exists) in first position, not as a fallback. So, overall, I think the change does more harm than good. Am I missing anything? Best Regards, Pavel
Pavel Krivitsky Lecturer in Statistics National Institute of Applied Statistics Research Australia (NIASRA) School of Mathematics and Applied Statistics | Building 39C Room 154 University of Wollongong NSW 2522 Australia T +61 2 4221 3713 Web (NIASRA): http://niasra.uow.edu.au/index.html Web (Personal): http://www.krivitsky.net/research ORCID: 0000-0002-9101-3362 NOTICE: This email is intended for the addressee named and may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, please delete it and notify the sender. Please consider the environment before printing this email.