Hi, I am interested in customizing the installation of R. I have gone through the “R Installation and Administration” manual. But some of the stuff is not clear to me and I would like to get clarifications on the following points (for a Windows installation with R_HOME=C:\\R\\R-2.9.1 ) : 1. I understand that I need to create a file, .Renviron with the following path : R_HOME\\etc\\.Renviron where a number of environmental variables can be set. I would first like to know if the file to be created is Renviron or .Renviron. Both versions are mentioned in the manual. By the way, many functions in R start with a period. Is there any special significance to a name (file, function etc) if it starts with a period? 2. I want to have two different libraries – one for the packages that follow with the R installation and a second one for any additional packages that I add afterwards. By doing this, I hope to avoid repeating the installation of these packages once again after an update of R. I understand that I can set the paths to these libraries with the environmental variables R_LIBS or R_LIBS_USER in the .Renviron file. But I am not entirely sure about the difference between these two environmental variables. It is mentioned in the manual that multiple paths (for different libraries) can be specified. Does this mean that I can set the paths with any of these environmental variables? Or, should I set R_LIBS=R_HOME\\library and R_LIBS_USER to my private library? Does this also mean that any package that I add with the install.packages() function will then end up in the private library? 3. If I want to start R with a certain set of packages loaded on startup, I understand that I need to create a file .Rprofile with the path R_HOME\\etc\\.Rprofile. Again, should it be .Rprofile or Rprofile (or, is it Rprofile.site which I see is already present in my R installation)? Is the following syntax OK for specifying the environmental variable R_DEFAULT_PACKAGES = {“base”, “datasets”,”utils”,”ggplot2”,“lattice”} How can I add, for example, ggplot2 and lattice to the list of default packages that R normally starts with? 4. If I add a .Renviron file to my working directory, will it override that in R_HOME? Or, is it the other way around? Can I add a .Rprofile file as well to the working directory where I can specify the R_DEFAULT_PACKAGES a little differently? Thanking you, Ravi
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