I would appreciate ideas about MS Windows install issues. I'm at our stats
summer camp and have been looking at a lot of Windows R installs and there
are some wrinkles about R_LIBS_USER.

On a clean Win7 or Win8 system, with R-3.0.1, we see the user library for
packages defaulting to  $HOME/R/win-library.

I think that's awesome, the way it should be. Yea! But it does not appear
that way on all systems, and I think it is because of lingering
after-effects of previous R installs.

In previous versions of R, R_LIBS_USER defaulted to
$HOME/AppData/Roaming/... That was not so great because it was (default)
hidden to the students and they were disoriented about how something that
does not exist (or show) could hold packages. Aside from teaching them how
to configure the file manager, we could navigate that.

The problem is that with R-3.0.1, sometimes we are seeing the user package
installs going into $HOME/AppData/Roaming/....

In the user account, there is no $HOME/.Rprofile or $HOME/.Renviron.

I hate to tell non-expert users that they ought to go fishing in the
Windows registry, but I'm starting to suspect that is what they ought to
do.  What do you think?

PJ

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science      Assoc. Director
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504      Center for Research Methods
University of Kansas                 University of Kansas
http://pj.freefaculty.org               http://quant.ku.edu

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

