On Mon, 26 Apr 2010, Marshall Feldman wrote:
So why not have the appropriate scripts ask a few questions upon the first installation of R (e.g., "Do you want to configure R with a "global" library for packages to make future upgrading easier?") and at upgrade time ("Your previous version of R has a "global" library; do you want the new version to use it?). I'd even go so far as to have the shell script automatically call an R script to run update.packages().
There is a large body of literature on this -- interactive questions of non-root users are useless; root user actiuons need to be scripted into the package management system acessible to automation to be scaleable, and to attain the needed administrator level permissions to make changed
The point is that most users just want to upgrade, and the upgrade procedure can and should (a) make this as seamless as possible and (b) allow those who may want to run specialized versions of R opt out of the automatic procedure.
and computers in a environment that has to conform to a hard specification (think: pharma research for FDA report preparation; financial service firms) that the IT department manages, cannot tolerate such diversity
There is no easy answer here, as 'one size cannot fit all' -- Russ herrold ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
