[R] R and packages

[Thomas Lumley]

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006, Erin Hodgess wrote:

> Dear R People:
>
> Here is yet another strange problem.
>
> I'm using R in one of my classes.  However, the computer lab has something
> called "Deep Freeze" and the students cannot save anything to the hard drive.
>
> I had R installed and things were working well.  They would save their
> .Rdata files to disks.
>
> Now, we need to add more packages.  We can't download and we can't
> bring them in via zip files (already tried both!)  When the zip files
> are expanded, of course they build new directories......

I would suggest making this the system administrator's problem.  Either 
your site really has a policy that would prohibit R packages (in which 
case trying to subvert it may not be a good idea) or it is exactly the 
sort of problem that system administrators are supposed to solve.

Distrust for R binary (and even source) packages is not a completely 
unreasonable attitude. They can execute arbitrary code on your computer 
and, in contrast to R itself, you usually have no real knowledge of who 
wrote them.

 	-thomas



> I'm completely annoyed because learning to download packages
> and installing them from local zips are actually important tasks!
> We're also losing good teaching/learning time!
>
> Anyhow, what I would like to do is produce a sort of combination R
> installation exe with our extra libraries as part of the package.
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions on how this could be done, please?
>
> This is R for Windows, Version 2.2.1
>
> Thanks for any help!  Sorry about the totally weird problem!
>
> Sincerely,
> Erin Hodgess
> Associate Professor
> Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences
> University of Houston - Downtown
> mailto: hodgess at gator.uhd.edu
>
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Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle