[R] installing R on RedHat

[Martyn Plummer]

On Tue, 2006-06-27 at 23:01 -0500, Marc Schwartz wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-06-27 at 22:18 -0500, Erin Hodgess wrote:
> > Dear R People:
> > 
> > Yet again, I am attempting to install R on RedHat Linux.
> > 
> > Here is my sorry attempt to date:
> > [hodgess at gator hodgess]$ rpm -vi R.rpm
> > warning: R.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 97d3544e
> > error: cannot write to %sourcedir /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES

It looks to me like  you are trying to install the *source*
RPM.

> > I only want to write it to my own userid, since I am the only one
> > who uses it.
> > 
> > Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
> 
> Erin,
> 
> As far as I know, the R RPMS provide either by Martyn Plummer et al on
> CRAN, or more recently via Fedora Extras, are generally not
> relocatable. 
> 
> In other words, they must be installed as root into a pre-defined
> location.
> 
> I checked the list archive and this had come up last year:
> 
> http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/R/tmp/Rhelp02a/archive/53976.html
> 
> and I don't know that this has changed.
> 
> If you need to install only as a local user, you will likely need to do
> so from source as I referenced in the above thread. See the R-admin
> manual for more information on how to configure for this.
> 
> More generally, if you have root access on your system, the default on
> Linux is to install using system-wide configurations, not per user, even
> if you are the only user.
> 
> User specific installation is generally only used if you need to install
> something and do not have root access.
> 
> HTH,
> 
> Marc Schwartz

Just to confirm that the RPMs are not relocatable. At one point they
were, but now all of the install destinations are parameterized in terms
of rpm macros such as %{_libdir} %{_infodir}, ... This allows the same
spec file to be used for multiple Linux distributions, but is
incompatible with making the RPM relocatable.

In your case, I don't see a problem with asking your system
administrator to install R for you.  You do not need write access to the
installation directories. You can install your own R packages without
administrative priviliges by defining the environment variable R_LIBS to
be a sub-directory of your home directory.

Martyn


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