[R] Installing R with all packages

[Don MacQueen]

If it's really true that you will be the only user of R, then it 
might be easier to build it in some place where you do have the 
necessary permissions. You would then follow the suggestion in the 
provided INSTALL file (from R 1.7.1):

---- quote ----
INSTALLATION

You do not need to install R to run it: you can run R by the script
`bin/R' which you can link or copy to any convenient place in your path.
---- end quote ----


Considering that R itself is updated fairly often, your sysadmin may 
appreciate if you are able to take care of maintaining R yourself.

If you are not the only user, your sysadmin might be willing to make 
the necessary copy or link in some directory in the standard user's 
path, leaving the installation in some place you own. Then you can do 
all the updates and package installations, and the sysadmin only 
needs to update the links/copies when R itself is updated. That's how 
we do it here, and it works very well.

-Don

At 10:27 AM +0200 10/7/03, 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?
>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?
>
>(The sysadmin would really appreciate if we could do it in a way that
>later additions of packages are reduced to a minimum.)
>
>Best,
>Christian
>
>
>***********************************************************************
>Christian Hennig
>Fachbereich Mathematik-SPST/ZMS, Universitaet Hamburg
>hennig at math.uni-hamburg.de, http://www.math.uni-hamburg.de/home/hennig/
>#######################################################################
>ich empfehle www.boag-online.de
>
>______________________________________________
>R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
>https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help


-- 
--------------------------------------
Don MacQueen
Environmental Protection Department
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Livermore, CA, USA