[R] Upgrade 'R'

[Keith Jewell]

"Prof Brian Ripley" <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote in message 
news:alpine.LFD.1.10.0809021124300.12240 at gannet.stats.ox.ac.uk...
> On Tue, 2 Sep 2008, Keith Jewell wrote:
>
>> As possible help to others, and also as a request for comments on how I
>> might do things better, I describe how I've recently altered my system to
>> handle this.
>>
>> I'm on a Windows Server 2003 network and the R installation is accessible 
>> to
>> many others. Everyone has "read" access to all installation files, but 
>> only
>> I have write access. I do _not_ have Administrator privileges on the 
>> server,
>> so I cannot make/change registry entries.
>>
>> R versions are in an R folder tree, which also holds the version 
>> independent
>> library folder.
>>
>> //Server02/stats/R
>> //Server02/stats/R/R-2.7.0
>> //Server02/stats/R/R-2.7.1
>> //Server02/stats/R/R-2.7.1pat
>> //Server02/stats/R/R-2.7.2
>>   :
>> //Server02/stats/R/library
>>
>> In each version I have edited /etc/Rprofile.site to include the line
>> .libPaths("//Server02/stats/R/library")
>>
>> The "default" libraries (base, boot, class...) are installed into the
>> relevant version specific .../R-n.n.n/library/ folder by the windows
>> installer program (e.g. R-2.7.2-win32.exe).
>> Occasionaly, and after installing a new R-version,  I update all the
>> downloaded libraries in the version independent 
>> //Server02/stats/R/library/
>> folder with a simple update.packages().
>>
>> HTH. Comments welcome.
>
> Please read the rw-FAQ for more details and insight, especially in using 
> Renviron.site (here you want to set R_LIBS_SITE: see ?libPaths) and using 
> update.packages(checkBuilt=TRUE, ask=FALSE)
>
> For example, my sysadmins have Windows R installed locally (via the MSI 
> installer), and then have on each machine in etc/Renviron.site have
>
> R_LIBS_SITE=N:/R/library/2.7
> R_LIBS_USER=P:/R/win-library/2.7
>
> This allows both common packages and user-specific packages to be stored 
> on SMB-mounted drives.  (N: is common to all machines, P: is 'personal' --  
> we use mapped drives rather than shares to allow quick changes of server)
>
> There are two reasons we install locally.  The first is performance: if 20 
> machines in a lab start R up simultaneously the network load is high.  The 
> second is that our security settings (and I believe the defaults these 
> days) disallow use of CHM help on network drives -- we remove the chtml 
> directories from packages installed on R_LIBS_SITE, so R defaults to text 
> help for those packages.
>

Thanks Professor Ripley. I'd looked at the R Windows FAQ but  not carefully
enough.Using Renviron.site does seem much more elegant than Rprofile.site.
I've now included a line in Renviron.site
R_LIBS_SITE=//Server02/stats/R/library

I also note your use of site and personal libraries specific to "first 
decimal"
versions of R. Would you recommend others to follow this practice?

Thanks again,

Keith Jewell.