[Rd] Installing/updating packages on a lab network

[Michael Friendly]

I'm the faculty member in my department who advises our IT staff on the 
details of installing R for
students and faculty on our Windows 7 lab network.  We are about to 
upgrade from R 3.1.1 to
R 3.2.1, and once that is done, this version of R and all installed 
packages will be frozen in the
image that appears in C:/Program Files/R/R-3.2.1/ on every lab computer, 
and this image is
refreshed on each computer at each new login.

Every user has a persistent home directory across all university lab 
computers, typically their
F:/ drive (students) and/or X:/ drive (faculty).  I need to give 
instructions to our IT staff for how to
arrange for a personal library, say
F:/~R/library
to be be set automatically, and included in .libPaths() so that 
install.packages() and update.packages()
will work using that path.

At present, there is no file R_HOME/etc/Renviron.site and 
R_HOME/etc/Rprofile.site is the vanilla
version with everything commented out, including
# set a site library
# .Library.site <- file.path(chartr("\\", "/", R.home()), "site-library")

Environmental variables set for users include
HOMEDRIVE=F:
HOMEPATH=\
HOMESHARE=\\vfadmin.yorku.yorku.ca\HH\HOME\friendly
with the latter mapped to the X: drive

What is the code to be added to Rprofile.site to make this work?

thanks,
-Michael



-- 
Michael Friendly     Email: friendly AT yorku DOT ca
Professor, Psychology Dept. & Chair, Quantitative Methods
York University      Voice: 416 736-2100 x66249 Fax: 416 736-5814
4700 Keele Street    Web:http://www.datavis.ca
Toronto, ONT  M3J 1P3 CANADA