RFC: Loading packages at startup

[David James]

I think the proposed changes will be useful. A couple of points
(mostly for simplicity):

Prof Brian D Ripley wrote:
> ...
> 
> 3) It would be useful to allow the library tree to be specified, as a
>    second field on the line.
  
Other than convenience (nothing wrong with that, of course) I don't
see too much need for this.  The .Renviron files may already have defined
R_LIBS, so the library tree may already be specified.

>  ...
>
> 5) We might want to allow a .Rpackages file to override Rpackages.site
>    (or we might not).  One idea is to allow a minus sign in front of a
>    package name, and to merge the Rpackages.site and .Rpackages files
>    before loading any packages.  If we did this we probably need to be
>    able to save the list of packages to be loaded (and can't easily save
>    those not to be loaded), so perhaps -- as the first list of .Rpackages
>    should empty the list.

Why not using arguments to R, say, --no-site-Rpackages and --no-Rpackages,
similar to --no-environ, --no-site-file, --no-init-file, and friends?
Adding specialized syntax with the minus sign seems a bit kludgy.

My preferance would be to have R by default include base and only
base (or whatever one package is the mimimum set), all other packages
(ctest, etc.) as part of the $R_HOME/etc/Rpackages.site, as the RFC
point 2) suggests.


> 
> 6) One could argue for R_HOME/etc/Rpackages as the `system' file as
>    well, and this might be useful if we break base up into smaller
>    components.
> 
> 7) I would allow comment lines in the files, starting with #.
> 
> 8) The file names or names could be set by environment variables.  It's
>    strange that we allow the site file names for Rprofile and Renviron and
>    the user file name for command histories to be set in that way.
> 
> -- 
> Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
> Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
> University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
> 1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
> Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595
> 
> 
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-- 
David A. James
Statistics Research, Room 2C-253            Phone:  (908) 582-3082       
Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies              Fax:    (908) 582-3340
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