[R] Should package be reinstalled when exterbal library is changed

[Eric Berger]

Hi Marc,
Normally updating external libraries would not require re-installing an R
package that uses it.
The R package will be able to "find" the new one, because the updated
library would be in the same place (sort of) as the previous library.
On a linux system this is handled by system soft links such as foo.so -->
foo.so.1 changes to foo.so --> foo.so.2
when a version '2' of the foo shared object (the .so.2) is now available to
replace version 1.
On Windows systems a .DLL corresponds to the linux .so.

While you won't need to re-install an R package you will need to start a
new R session.

At a more advanced level you actually can explicitly tell R which .so (or
.dll) files to pull in via the function dyn.load()
See ?dyn.load for details.

HTH,
Eric





On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 5:06 PM Marc Girondot via R-help <
r-help using r-project.org> wrote:

> Dear R-experts,
>
> Some packages need external libraries to be installed. For example ncdf4
> needs netcdf library or flextable need pandoc.
>
> When there is new version of external library, should the R package be
> installed again to use the new external version, or do the package finds
> itself the new version? Perhaps the answer is "It depends on the
> package", and so how to know if it requires new compilation or not ?
>
> Thanks
>
> Marc
>
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