Thanks David. What if I set up my .libPaths so that all packages (except those installed by default with R) reside in a single location outside of 'Framework' directory? So when I upgrade R to a major version (e.g. 3.x to 3.y), the new version will continue to use packages at that location, would it be OK?
I am not worried about losing older versions or their source files, in fact, I am concerned with the opposite - having older versions lying around unused and I want to clear those up. It's good to know that packages for a current major version get overwritten so no older file is left dangling. On Mon, Sep 28, 2015 at 11:30 PM, David Winsemius <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Sep 28, 2015, at 10:38 PM, Chris Yang wrote: > >> Hello, >> >> I am new to R and just installed R and RStudio on a Mac. >> >> I have a question about managing packages in R. I wonder if there is >> the need and functionality to periodically clean up packages installed >> via RStudio, e.g. older versions, files downloaded for installation, >> etc. Does the update remove the older version completely before >> installing a new one? And what about installation from source? >> >> I ask because Homebrew (a package manager for OS X) keeps older >> versions of a package and the files necessary for past installations >> upon updates but it offers a command to clean up these stuff too. I >> wonder if it is the same for R. > > If you have older versions of R in a Framework directory tree, those packages > are kept but if you update a package in the current major version it will be > over-written. That is not a Mac specific behavior. > > You may be able to recover older versions with a Time Machine copy, but I'm > not clear why you would want to do so. You can also pull source copies of > earlier package version in the CRAN archives. > > -- > David Winsemius > Alameda, CA, USA > _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Mac mailing list [email protected] https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
