[Rd] install.packages question / suggestion

[Thomas Stabla]

On Fri, 22 Oct 2004, Peter Dalgaard wrote:

> Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:
> 
> > On Fri, 22 Oct 2004, Thomas Stabla wrote:
> ....
> > > 1) install.packages("<package>") will install <package>, no matter if 
> > >    <package> has already been installed.
> > > 2) the readline() at the end of install.packages, which asks the user, if 
> > >    the downloaded files should be deleted, makes it difficult to 
> > >    delete packages automatically after installation (I must admit, I'm not 
> > >    quite familiar with R CMD BATCH)
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Question/Request:
> > > Is the behaviour in 1) intended?
> > 
> > Most definitely.  I might want to install it in another library, or to 
> > reinstall it under the current version of R.  
> 
> Or, as happened to me about an hour ago: You install a package with a
> dozen dependencies, then realize that you want to rerun with
> dependencies=TRUE.

Similar thing happended to me, I simply forgot to set dep=TRUE, and 
afterwards, was annoyed, when I had to reinstall the packages that were 
already installed. 
Therefore the changes I made wouldn't prevent a rerun with  
dependencies=TRUE, because the packages which are already installed are 
not excluded from "pkgs" until the dependencies have been checked.

Thomas Stabla