[R] installing R on RedHat

[Marc Schwartz]

On Wed, 2006-06-28 at 10:26 +0200, Martyn Plummer wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-06-27 at 23:01 -0500, Marc Schwartz wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-06-27 at 22:18 -0500, Erin Hodgess wrote:
> > > Dear R People:
> > > 
> > > Yet again, I am attempting to install R on RedHat Linux.
> > > 
> > > Here is my sorry attempt to date:
> > > [hodgess at gator hodgess]$ rpm -vi R.rpm
> > > warning: R.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 97d3544e
> > > error: cannot write to %sourcedir /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES
> 
> It looks to me like  you are trying to install the *source*
> RPM.
> 
> > > I only want to write it to my own userid, since I am the only one
> > > who uses it.
> > > 
> > > Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
> > 
> > Erin,
> > 
> > As far as I know, the R RPMS provide either by Martyn Plummer et al on
> > CRAN, or more recently via Fedora Extras, are generally not
> > relocatable. 
> > 
> > In other words, they must be installed as root into a pre-defined
> > location.
> > 
> > I checked the list archive and this had come up last year:
> > 
> > http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/R/tmp/Rhelp02a/archive/53976.html
> > 
> > and I don't know that this has changed.
> > 
> > If you need to install only as a local user, you will likely need to do
> > so from source as I referenced in the above thread. See the R-admin
> > manual for more information on how to configure for this.
> > 
> > More generally, if you have root access on your system, the default on
> > Linux is to install using system-wide configurations, not per user, even
> > if you are the only user.
> > 
> > User specific installation is generally only used if you need to install
> > something and do not have root access.
> > 
> > HTH,
> > 
> > Marc Schwartz
> 
> Just to confirm that the RPMs are not relocatable. At one point they
> were, but now all of the install destinations are parameterized in terms
> of rpm macros such as %{_libdir} %{_infodir}, ... This allows the same
> spec file to be used for multiple Linux distributions, but is
> incompatible with making the RPM relocatable.
> 
> In your case, I don't see a problem with asking your system
> administrator to install R for you.  You do not need write access to the
> installation directories. You can install your own R packages without
> administrative priviliges by defining the environment variable R_LIBS to
> be a sub-directory of your home directory.

Thanks for the confirmation Martyn.

Regards,

Marc