Hello R Community, I've been using R for a long time, and this is a question that still makes me think twice every single time I install R, which is more and more often .
The first search hit is this StackOverflow question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32540919/library-is-not-writable The warning message hasn't changed over the years: install.packages("randomForest") Installing package into ‘/usr/local/lib/R/site-library’ (as ‘lib’ is unspecified) Warning in install.packages : 'lib = "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library"' is not writable In this question they suggest using the personal library, which is what I end up doing as well, but some people suggest changing your group. This actually seems like the right answer to me, but others say they had problems when they changed groups, which also sounds about right. Can someone please tell me (or tell StackOverflow) the real best practice? I've gotten into some very thorny issues with installations that can't find any library when I deploy jobs using cron or other users, and it's hard to remember / figure out how to install (if missing) libraries in the script because it's hard to remember the mirror syntax. I know there's a packrat package, and I've invented some workarounds, but I normally just need two or three stable packages for a particular project. I'd bet that .libPaths would be implemented differently today, but maybe with the right library path none of that would be necessary to understand? My final simplified questions are: 1. What is the best practice to install libraries so that the current user (Linux) can always find them? 2. Why is the default library path not writable by default, should we change that? Hope everyone's doing well out there, and I hope to see some of you at conferences when things get back to normal. Thank you, Gene [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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.