[R-sig-Debian] using R-devel independently of sid packages

[Sebastian P. Luque]

On Tue, 4 Oct 2011 17:06:17 -0500,
Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:

[...]

> In essence, I do what you do:

>  - keep r-devel from svn

>  - configure; make; make install it to a directory in /usr/local/lib

>  - keep the binaries out of the $PATH and use shell wrappers and
> variables to launch it

I guess it doesn't matter much where the SVN checkout goes, but I've
been doing:

cd /usr/local/src/R-devel
svn co https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk

and then configure and make.  What's the advantage of 'make install' to
/usr/local/lib?

I have /usr/local/bin in $PATH, and then wrote a wrapper script
(/usr/local/bin/R-devel) like you suggest:

---<--------------------cut here---------------start------------------->---
#! /bin/sh
R_LIBS_USER=/usr/local/lib/R-devel/site-library \
    /usr/local/src/R-devel/bin/R
---<--------------------cut here---------------end--------------------->---

so that running it would give:

R> .libPaths()
[1] "/usr/local/lib/R-devel/site-library" "/usr/local/src/R-devel/library"     

which allows install.packages(), update.packages(), 'R-devel CMD ...'
for that matter, to work on the first element by default, as is usually
intended.

A neat about this is that if 'exec-path' in Emacs has the path where
this wrapper is (/usr/local/bin in my case), then ESS understands it as
an R version to run with all the goodies that implies.


> Not ideal, but gets the job done and I won't have time do anything
> fancier.  If you wanted to, you could wrap the above into a local .deb
> package too.

The above seems comfortable enough to me.  Thanks for these pointers!


-- 
Seb