[R] .Renviron for multiple hardwares...

[Jeffrey Horner]

Jonathan Greenberg wrote:
> Our lab has a lot of different unix boxes, with different hardware, and 
> I'm assuming (perhaps wrongly) that by setting a per-user package 
> installation directory, the packages will only work on one type of 
> hardware.  Our systems are all set up to share the same home directory 
> (and, thus, the same .Renviron file) -- so, is there a way to set, in 
> the .Renviron file, per-computer or per-hardware settings?  The idea is 
> to have a different package installation directory for each computer 
> (e.g. "~/R/computer1/packages" and "~/R/computer2/packages".
> 
> Thoughts?  Ideas?  Thanks!

You would certainly want to look at altering the library path on R 
startup using the RProfile.site file (see ?Startup). You R code could 
use bits of info from the R variables .Platform and .Machine, plus some 
environment variables for UNIX platform info.

As an example of altering the library path, this is what I have used in 
the past for my personal .Rprofile file:

### Add development R versions to the library path first
devlib <- paste('~/Rlib',gsub(' ','_',R.version.string),sep='/')
if (!file.exists(devlib))
         dir.create(devlib)

x <- .libPaths()
.libPaths(c(devlib,x))
rm(x,devlib)

So when I start up the latest development version of R, this is what is set:

$ /home/hornerj/R-sources/trunk/bin/R --quiet
 > .libPaths()
[1] 
"/home/hornerj/Rlib/R_version_2.9.0_Under_development_(unstable)_(2008-10-14_r46718)"
[2] "/home/hornerj/R-sources/trunk/library"

But with the latest ubuntu R release:

$ R --quiet
 > .libPaths()
[1] "/home/hornerj/Rlib/R_version_2.8.1_(2008-12-22)"
[2] "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library"
[3] "/usr/lib/R/site-library"
[4] "/usr/lib/R/library"

Jeff
-- 
http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/JeffreyHorner