[Rd] PR#9848

[ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk]

The behaviour you quote is the documented behaviour in R 2.5.1.
Please do RTFM, especially ?install.packages:

      'install.packages' can be used to install new packages/bundles. It
      takes a vector of names and a destination library, downloads the
      packages from the repositories and installs them.  (If the library
      is omitted it defaults to the first directory in '.libPaths()',
      with a warning if there is more than one.)  If 'lib' is omitted or
      is of length one and is not a (group) writeable directory, the
      code offers to create a personal library tree (the first element
      of 'Sys.getenv("R_LIBS_USER")') and install there. Detection of a
      writeable directory is problematic on Windows: see the Warning
      section.

Now, it is entirely possible that Windows is mis-reporting on the 
permissions available, but that would not be a bug in R and one that is 
warned about (twice) on the help page.

That you can write a specific file there is not the issue, as the help 
page explains in detail.  You need to be able to write specfic types of 
files there, and a recent WinXP patch stops you being able to do that on 
networked drives.

On Mon, 13 Aug 2007, russell-lenth at uiowa.edu wrote:

> Oops -- I meant R version 2.5.1, not 1.5.1.  My apologies.

So you did mean 1.4.1?  Two separate major version errors suggest that you 
really are insufficiently unaware of what you are using.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at 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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595