[Rd] symbolic linking to library files

[Kasper Daniel Hansen]

I agree with the other poster's advice to just give guru permission to  
write to the R library folder.

But the thing you want is the following. Create a directory somewhere  
that guru has write permission, for example
~guru/library
(although I guess I would recommend somewhere else than guru's home  
directory) and do an R CMD INSTALL into that directory, for example by
   R CMD INSTALL Blaster -l ~guru/library

You can make this directory accessible for all your users by altering  
site.profile to contain for example
   .libPaths("~guru/library")
or by creating an environment variable for all users (how you do that  
can probably be accomplished in many ways), like
   export R_LIBS=/home/guru/library

That should be enough to get you started.

Kasper



On Jul 17, 2008, at 6:16 PM, egc wrote:

> I handle SysAdmin for a multi-user Linux box, with R 2.7.1 compiled  
> and
> installed to make usee of ACML (Opteron chips). The library files  
> (packages)
> are installed to /usr/local/lib64/R/library
>
> Everything works as it should, except for the following. Say I have  
> a user
> (an R developer) who has developed a package called Blaster. We'll  
> call the
> user guru. Now,  /home/guru/Blaster, contains the needed directory  
> structure
> to do a normal install (i.e., R CMD INSTALL Blaster), but the user  
> can't
> write to /usr/local/lib64/R/library. Sure, said user can do a local  
> install,
> so *he* can use Blaster, but we'd like it so that changes guru makes  
> to
> Blaster are available to everyone.
>
> My first simple-minded solution to this was to simply create a  
> symbolic link
> to Blaster from within /usr/local/lib64/R/library. However, this  
> doesn't
> seem to work. Invoking library(Blaster) gives an error message about  
> Blaster
> not being a valid library.
>
> Apparently, R CMD INSTALL Blaster does something more than simply copy
> Blaster to the appropriate directory. I did a quick perusual of what  
> I could
> find online, but I suspect I've missed something - hopefully not too
> embarassingly obvious.
>
> Basically, what I'd like to do is create a symbolic link to  
> 'something' that
> guru creates, from within /usr/local/lib64/R/library, such that (i)  
> Blaster
> is available to all users on the system, and (ii) any changes Guru  
> makes to
> his code are automatically available. Is anything like this feasible?
>
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>
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