[R] Installing R with all packages

[Uwe Ligges]

Christian Hennig wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I want R to be installed on a UNIX network (Solaris). I am not the system
> administrator and so I cannot do it myself.
> The system administrator wants to know which packages I want, and it may be 
> a lot. 
> Is there an easy way to download and install all packages at once?

Yes. Combination of CRAN.packages() and install.packages() will do, but 
it's for sure an overhead to install all packages given you are the only 
one who uses R on that machine.


> Is it a good idea? (There is a good chance that I do not need the some 
> few packages that do not install well during such a procedure, and so I would
> like to tell the sysadmin to do it even if it will not be 100% successful).
> 
> Unfortunately it may be even more compicated, because it may be (I was not
> able to find it out absolutely surely) that our net 
> architecture does not allow to do it via 
> install.packages from within R. So what is the easiest way to
> do it from outside R?
> 
> If it is not a good idea to install all packages 
> at once, what is the easiest way to
> download and install a list of, say, 30 packages? R CMD INSTALL accepts a
> list as input; but how to download a list of 30 packages at once?

E.g. download.file() within R or "wget" outside are the tools I'd choose.


> (The sysadmin would really appreciate if we could do it in a way that 
> later additions of packages are reduced to a minimum.)

Have you told the sysadmin that some packages are updated very frequently?


I propose to set up your own library section (in a directory accessible 
by yourself), where you can install packages independently from the 
sysadmin.

Uwe Ligges