Hey all,

One of the things that has come up from the recent Release/Devel
distinction thread on this list is that people don't consider there to be
an easy way of handling both at the same time.

I'd like to offer an alternative based on the switchr
https://github.com/gmbecker/switchr package I'm developing.

switchr is designed to allow seamless switching between distinct sets of
installed packages. It also has build in support for the BioC release/devel
distinction, like so:

>* library(switchr)*
> *switchTo(BiocDevel)*
trying URL '
http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/3.0/bioc/bin/windows/contrib/3.1/BiocInstaller_1.15.5.zip
'
Content type 'application/zip' length 109769 bytes (107 Kb)
opened URL
downloaded 107 Kb

package 'BiocInstaller' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
Switched to the 'BioC_3.0' computing environment. 31 packages are currently
available. Packages installed in your site library ARE suppressed.
 To switch back to your previous environment type switchBack()
>* BiocInstaller::biocVersion()*
[1] '3.0'
>* switchBack()*
Reverted to the 'original' computing environment. 40 packages are currently
available. Packages installed in your site library ARE NOT suppressed.
 To switch back to your previous environment type switchBack()
>* BiocInstaller::biocVersion()*
[1] '2.14'

Note that this only works if you have an R version able to install the
devel version of the BiocInstaller package, but that will be true of any
solution using BioC Devel. I'm working on making the failure more graceful
when this is not the case, and on writing/updating the documentation more
generally.

switchr is more widely useful than this, which I will be talking about
publicly soon, but since it is so on-topic I figured I'd give this list a
heads-up on this aspect of it.

Please feel free to try switchr out, any feedback is appreciated.
~G
-- 
Computational Biologist
Genentech Research

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