[R] defaults in R: packages, .Rhistory

[Jacob Wegelin]

With the current version (rw1070), every time I start R it loads a whole
bunch of packages, many of which I do not need in a typical session:

> search()
[1] ".GlobalEnv"      "package:methods" "package:ctest"   "package:mva"
[5] "package:modreg"  "package:nls"     "package:ts"      "Autoloads"
[9] "package:base"

Loading all these packages makes R slow to start up, and I presume it
uses up memory too.

Is there a reason that all these packages load automatically? Is
there some way to stop this from happening, by changing some default?

> version
         _
platform i386-pc-mingw32
arch     i386
os       mingw32
system   i386, mingw32
status
major    1
minor    7.0
year     2003
month    04
day      16
language R

A separate question also related to defaults:

Is there a way to get R to refrain from truncating the .Rhistory file
(removing the earliest saved commands), so that .Rhistory might serve
as a permanent record of every command issued?

Thanks for any info

Jake