Short answer:
setRepositories() # chose what you want from BioC
install.packages()
works and always has. 'Smoke and mirrors' are not actually needed.
As for relocatability:
I am guessing you are talking about a Linux cluster ... but the details
do matter.
The distribution of Windows binaries relies on installed packages being
relocatable, so most packages are written to be. There are a very few
exceptions: the one most frequently encountered is packages linked to
Rcpp, which on Linux put the path to Rcpp in their DSOs. So you can
relocate the package, but not the Rcpp installation it is linked to.
(Not a problem on other OSes as it statically links elsewhere.)
A question you did not ask is if you can use differently located R: in
most cases yes (I regularly run different versions of R with the same
library trees).
We've relocated complete CRAN/BioC installations on Linux several times.
On 19/07/2012 17:13, Paul Johnson wrote:
I've asked a question in the BioConductor list about package
management. My solution depends on your answer to the following
question.
Are installed R packages "relocatable"?
I mean relocatable in the same sense that files in a RedHat RPM file
might be "relocatable" after compiling
(http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm/ch-rpm-reloc.html). This allows one to
build a package as the ordinary user and then the root user can take
the result and put it wherever it fits well in the path (say,
/usr/local/lib/R/library).
Here is why I asked. I manage packages in our cluster and some users
have asked me to install some BioConductor packages. BioConductor
install documents expect me to run a script as root that does a bunch
of changes, and I'm just unwilling to do that. If I have to do
something as root, it has to be something more focused like running a
particular R command (install.packages(), for example). It seems
insane to me that they expect (http://www.bioconductor.org/install) a
root user to run
source("http://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R";)
biocLite("limma")
If I could do the installs as me with their script, and then copy the
install folder into the system, then it would be OK, if the packages
would work.
Or perhaps post-processing is required to fiddle some paths inside
package files?
pj
--
Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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