On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Paul Johnson <pauljoh...@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 _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Debian mailing list R-SIG-Debian@r-project.org https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-debian
