I would actually go a step in the other direction: per project libraries. For example by adding a .Rprofile file to your project directory. This ensures that everybody working on a project uses the same version of the packages (even on different machines e.g. on shared folders).

This can give issues when a new version of R arrives, but that is usually easy to solve. Either hard code the path to the old R-version or decide to update all packages in a project to the new R-version (and test that everything is still working ok).

We have the most often used packages installed centrally on the server/network, so I actually usually end up with a mixture of central, personal and project libraries. Theory vs practice.

HTH,
Jan



On 08-04-2021 02:58, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
Hi Gene,

"It's complicated". (Not really, but listen for a sec...)

We need to ship a default policy that makes sense for all / most
situations.  So

- users cannot write into /usr/local/lib/R/site-library -- unless they are
   set up to, but adding them to the 'group' that owns that directory

- root can (but ideally one should not run as root as one generally does not
   now what code you might get slipped in a tar.gz); but root can enable users

- so we recommend letting (some or all) users write there by explicitly
   adding them to an appropriate group.

Personally, I do not think personal libraries are a good idea on shared
machines because you can end up with a different set of package (versions)
than your colleague on the same machine.  And or you running shiny from $HOME
have different packages than shiny running as server. And on and on. Other
people differ, and that is fine. If one wants personal libraries one can.

I must have explained the reasoning and fixes a dozen times each on
r-sig-debian (where you could have asked this too) and StackOverflow. At
least the latter can be searched so look at this set:
https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=user%3Ame+is%3Aanser+%2Fusr%2Flocal%2Flib%2FR%2Fsite-library

Happy to take it offline too, and who knows, we even get to meet for a coffee
one of these days.

Hope this helps, Dirk


______________________________________________
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.

Reply via email to