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

[Prasenjit Kapat]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Paul Johnson <pauljohn32 at gmail.com> 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.
>
> 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.

Interesting that you bring this up. I can confirm this (lack of)
behavior on RedHat atleast.

>From the *NEW FEATURES* section under *CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.5.0* of
http://www.cran.r-project.org/src/base/NEWS

If 'lib' is not specified or is specified of length one and
	the chosen location is not a writable directory,
	install.packages() offers to create a personal library
	directory for you if one does not already exist, and to
	install there.

If I understand correctly, this "feature" is not an artifact of a
distribution specific packaging. It irks me how an rpm installation (I
can talk of RedHat 5.4 only) blatantly ignores this, even to this day
(R 2.10.0)! And I fail to understand how/why, especially when
R_LIBS_USER is very specifically hardcoded in
/usr/lib64/R/etc/Renviron  (for x86_64)!!!

(Anyway, this is not the appropriate list for discussing any solution.)

-- 
Prasenjit