R-alpha: RHOME

[Paul Gilbert]

> * In general, we have two ways of arranging the `library' tree.  One is,
> grouped according to module, the other, according to type.  I.e.,

> 	library/<module>/
> 	library/<module>/funs/
> 	library/<module>/help/

I find this a much better way to organize things. Old versions of
packages can be removed cleanly with

rm -r library/<package>

It also means that the userid for the maintainer of a package does not
necessarily need to be the userid of R.

> * (As an aside, we could also discuss whether we want to have several
> versions of R installed simultaneously.  This would imply having

> 	RHOME/<version_1>/...
> 	RHOME/<version_2>/...
>  ...
> * The main question is, how is the right platform determined at runtime?
>  ...

There seems to be an assumption here that RHOME will be the same no
matter what machine you are running on. I would set RHOME depending on
the machine, eg.

RHOME=/usr/local/lib/R-Sun4
RHOME=/usr/local/lib/R-Sun5
RHOME=/usr/local/lib/R-Linux386

and then use links to the XDR files and other files which are not
machine dependent, so they do not have to be duplicated.

Determining the platform universally may be fairly difficult, but at a
given site there is usually a fairly small mix of machines and it is
possible to write a shell script to determine the machine. In fact,
this is a pretty common problem and you are probably already doing it
in your .login or .chrc.

Paul Gilbert
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