[R-SIG-Mac] upgradeable R layout

[Simon Urbanek]

On Nov 13, 2008, at 19:28 , Alexy Khrabrov wrote:

> Greetings -- I'd like to keep my R on Mac in an upgradeable way. I  
> noticed that currently all packages I installed from R.app are in  
> the R.framework -- are they going to be clobbered when I replace R  
> 2.7.2 by 2.8.0?
>

No, they will stay in the 2.7 folder. You can re-install them for 2.8  
by selecting "Select packages from R 2.7" in the search field of the  
Package Installer and clicking on "Install Selected".


> At the same time with the upgrade, I'd also like to switch to 64  
> bit.  One good page I found about it is
>
> http://www.matthewckeller.com/html/64_bit_r_on_mac.html
>

That page is dangerous and incorrect (see my earlier post about it on  
this list). I would advise users to be cautious about following  
instructions blindly, you better be sure that the person knows what s/ 
he's writing about. If you feel that some instructions on CRAN or the  
R for Mac Devel page are insufficient, say so here instead of  
speculating!


> It suggests that packages are installed into a separate directory by  
> doing it from command line install.packages with a lib= parameter.
>
> Now I'd like to install everything into a lib anyways, but  
> preferably without having to specify lib= all the time -- is there a  
> way to make my local location the default for install.packages?
>

Several - see "At User Level" and "As defined by .libPath()" options  
in the Package Installer.


> Also -- can the R.app be tweaked to do all this, if I want to use it  
> with the 64 bit and local install for packages?
>

What do you mean by "all this"? It already supports an easy upgrade  
between R version and custom paths so I really don't see what you're  
missing.

Cheers,
S


> The idea is to make upgrading R smooth -- ideally, it would do  
> update.packages(checkBuilt =
> TRUE) by itself as a part of the upgrade.
>
> Are there other ways to simplify R upgrade on Mac and/or am I  
> missing something?
>
> Cheers,
> Alexy
>
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