[R-SIG-Mac] Consistency of information about installed packages

[Rob J Goedman]

Hi Don and Simon,

On Apr 28, 2005, at 1:00 PM, Simon Urbanek wrote:

>> The only hint I saw, and it showed up in the Installer, was to remove 
>> copies of old RAqua. In fact, it says "previous versions of the Cocoa 
>> GUI are fine". Maybe I didn't look hard enough, but that looked 
>> pretty definite to me.
>
> It's ok to install over previous version, no problem, but if you use 
> your own private R packages, you cannot share them across R versions 
> (that's why personally I recommend to avoid that practice unless you 
> have no admin access). The safest thing is to delete ~/Library/R after 
> upgrade. We don't want the installer to be destructive, that's why 
> don't do it by default.

I know, but if you install R-2.1.0 on top of an existing install, 
except the default libraries, doesn't it leave
all other libraries in the system library folder intact as well? I've 
not seen many problems with packages in
this upgrade (from R-2.0.1 to R-2.1.0), but isn't it a good idea to 
pick up a fresh set of packages? Hence
my earlier suggestion to delete  both /Library/Frameworks/R.framework 
and ~/Library/R/library before
doing the install. And thanks to Stefano nearly all of them are 
available in binary format on the CRAN
web site.

If Don has a copy of deldir in the system library, could this behaviour 
be the result?

Maybe helpful for other folks on the mailing list, on the other part of 
Simon's earlier response:

> I remember that sometimes the script tries to change permissions of 
> the .css file, which fails depending on your setup, but that's 
> irrelevat for the package), but if a package is retained after 
> installation it usaully indicates that the installation was 
> successful, regardles of the exit status.

Indeed, I typically change the permissions of the R.css file
( /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/library/R.css ) to allow 
Read & Write
permissions by myself.

Rob