[BioC] writing of /usr/lib/R

[Michael Green]

New to the list, first post!

I'm doing sysadmin work for our Bioinformatics department where I
manage a couple of IBM BladeCenter based clusters. Systems are running
SLES9 SP1 i586 (dual Xeon 32bit).
Before I'm going to ask my question I must admit that I'm complete
novice to R, and since I won't use it myself I didn't read much of the
documentation supplied with the package. My question is more related
to system administration + R, rather then to R itself.

So here it is:
Some time ago I received a request from our users to install R on one
of the clusters.
I went ahead and installed R-base-2.1.0-1 supplied by the vendor (SuSE/Novell).
After that following the request of the users, I installed the
Bioconductor packages using the standard procedure described at
<http://www.bioconductor.org/download>:
source("http://www.bioconductor.org/biocLite.R")
biocLite()

Soon thereafter it became apparent that during their work with R, our
users need to install/uninstall or otherwise change the hierarchy
under /usr/lib/R  which is of course not writable by any user other
than root. As you surely know that's the case for almost every
directory under /usr. From talking to one of my users I've learned
that R routinely downloads/installs/updates itself and the changes go
into /usr/lib/R exclusively (or almost exclusively?).
Now I'm faced with dilemma of how to allow users to write to
/usr/lib/R, which is not a big deal on itself as there are at least a
couple of ways doing that:
1. Play with standard unix permissions: create a new group for R
users; chgrp <that_group> /usr/lib/R. etc...
2. Create ACL for /usr/lib/R

But my question is not about how to make /usrlib/R writable, but this:
since /usr and everything under it is not traditionally writable by
regular users what's the official stance of R developers on this? Is
it assumed that all R users should have root access to the system
where R installed to be able to change contents of /usr/lib/R and
actually do any useful work?

About our R installation:
bioinfo4:/usr/lib/R # R

R : Copyright 2005, The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Version 2.1.0  (2005-04-18), ISBN 3-900051-07-0

> sessionInfo()
R version 2.1.0, 2005-04-18, i686-pc-linux-gnu

attached base packages:
[1] "methods"   "stats"     "graphics"  "grDevices" "utils"     "datasets"
[7] "base"

--
Warm regards,
Michael Green