[R-SIG-Mac] Package management in R

[Chris Yang]

Thanks David. What if I set up my .libPaths so that all packages
(except those installed by default with R) reside in a single location
outside of 'Framework' directory? So when I upgrade R to a major
version (e.g. 3.x to 3.y), the new version will continue to use
packages at that location, would it be OK?

I am not worried about losing older versions or their source files, in
fact, I am concerned with the opposite - having older versions lying
around unused and I want to clear those up. It's good to know that
packages for a current major version get overwritten so no older file
is left dangling.


On Mon, Sep 28, 2015 at 11:30 PM, David Winsemius
<dwinsemius at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> On Sep 28, 2015, at 10:38 PM, Chris Yang wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I am new to R and just installed R and RStudio on a Mac.
>>
>> I have a question about managing packages in R. I wonder if there is
>> the need and functionality to periodically clean up packages installed
>> via RStudio, e.g. older versions, files downloaded for installation,
>> etc. Does the update remove the older version completely before
>> installing a new one? And what about installation from source?
>>
>> I ask because Homebrew (a package manager for OS X) keeps older
>> versions of a package and the files necessary for past installations
>> upon updates but it offers a command to clean up these stuff too. I
>> wonder if it is the same for R.
>
> If you have older versions of R in a Framework directory tree, those packages are kept but if you update a package in the current major version it will be over-written. That is not a Mac specific behavior.
>
> You may be able to recover older versions with a Time Machine copy, but I'm not clear why you would want to do so. You can also pull source copies of earlier package version in the CRAN archives.
>
> --
> David Winsemius
> Alameda, CA, USA
>