On Jun 14, 2013, at 4:04 PM, Martin Maechler wrote: >>>>>> Martin Maechler <maech...@stat.math.ethz.ch> >>>>>> on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:44:57 +0200 writes: > >>>>>> Dirk Eddelbuettel <e...@debian.org> >>>>>> on Sat, 8 Jun 2013 11:22:56 -0500 writes: > >>> Summary: > >>> The directory /usr/local/lib/R/site-library can be used >>> for site-wide multi-user installations of R. > >>> This is even the default on Debian and Ubuntu (following >>> a suggestion by Kurt and Fritz a decade ago over beers -- >>> what could be better). However, R enforces wrong >>> permissions on directories and files there (removing >>> group-write) which effectively defeats this purpose, and >>> breaks multiuser installation: if Tom, Dick and Harry are >>> members of group 'r-users', each one can install in the >>> directory, but neither can _upgrade_ a package installed >>> by one of the others. > >>> I would like to correct this. > > >>> Details: > >> [..........] > > >>> Proposal: > >>> Add a new option() [with a to-be-determined name] which, >>> if enabled, turns on group-write modes for files and >>> directories, ie "664" and "775". > >> [.........] > >>> I would be happy to write such a patch (including >>> documentation updates) if someone from R Core can signal >>> willigness to look at it. > >> "signal!" :-) > > In the mean time, Dirk has sent me a patch which I've Martinized > a tiny bit, > and committed now, both for R-devel and 'R 3.0.1 patched'. > The new feature is advertized as > > R CMD INSTALL --group-writable installs packages group writably, > such that update.packages() works for other group members > (suggested and from a patch by Dirk Eddelbuettel). > > Wishing everyone a nice weekend, >
I think it would be better to have a bit more sane handling of this. The decision is rarely at the install time of the package -- e.g. did you adjust the flag for INSTALL in update.packages based on the permissions? Otherwise it fails the next time and confuses the hell out of users! Although it's certainly a step up from the previously hard-coded default, I would argue that the most desired behavior is to follow the permissions already set up. If the library is setup to be group-writable then the package should be installed group-writable. The point is that anything else makes less sense - the user can still use rm -rf and re-install it even if the package is not writable. It's just update.packages() that fails. Cheers, Simon > Martin Maechler, > ETH Zurich > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > > ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
