[R-sig-Debian] There's a nice packaging thing you do...

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Hi Paul,

On 13 January 2010 at 13:05, Paul Johnson wrote:
| Hello, Dirk (and everybody):
| 
| I have Ubuntu on some systems and I notice there's a very nice thing
| you do with your R packages.  The system is setup so that packages
| installed from deb go into /usr/lib/R, while packages built from
| scratch by root go into /usr/local/.., and if the user runs
| install.packages(), then it gets dumped into the user's own account.

Credit where credit is due -- Fritz and Kurt suggested that to me the first
time I made it to Vienna (for DSC 2003 if memory serves)

   R 'recommended' packages get	      /usr/lib/R/library
   (eg boot, survival, MASS, ...)

   Pre-packaged r-cran* deb	      /usr/lib/R/site-library

   'The rest'			      /usr/local/lib/R/site-library

which is indeed pretty nice as we separate installation via dpkg, apt,
aptitude, ... from that with R (install.packages(), R CMD INSTALL, ...)

That is done via the setting of R_LIBS_SITE (formerly: R_LIBS) in
/etc/R/Renviron -- the very trick suggested by Fritz and Kurt.

| I'm much more familiar with RedHat/Fedora systems, and they don't have
| that approach built in.  I've not tried to install a package on an RPM
| based system as an ordinary user lately, but in the old days it failed
| because user's can't write in /usr/lib.  I am certain the RPM based
| systems don't segregate packages installed from RPM and built by root
| with install.packages.
| 
| Am I correct in my "detective work" that your package is making
| changes to the Renviron file to make this happen?  Are there other
| changes as well?  I'd like to do the same to an RPM setup.

Not to package management, I think. 

We do get Deepayan's tab-completion for bash and a bunch of other niceties --
read the source, in this case debian/rules of the r-base package for Debian :)
 
Thanks for kind encouragement.

Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.