[R] /usr/local/lib/R/site-library is not writable

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Hi Gene,

"It's complicated". (Not really, but listen for a sec...)

We need to ship a default policy that makes sense for all / most
situations.  So

- users cannot write into /usr/local/lib/R/site-library -- unless they are
  set up to, but adding them to the 'group' that owns that directory

- root can (but ideally one should not run as root as one generally does not
  now what code you might get slipped in a tar.gz); but root can enable users

- so we recommend letting (some or all) users write there by explicitly
  adding them to an appropriate group.

Personally, I do not think personal libraries are a good idea on shared
machines because you can end up with a different set of package (versions)
than your colleague on the same machine.  And or you running shiny from $HOME
have different packages than shiny running as server. And on and on. Other
people differ, and that is fine. If one wants personal libraries one can.

I must have explained the reasoning and fixes a dozen times each on
r-sig-debian (where you could have asked this too) and StackOverflow. At
least the latter can be searched so look at this set:
https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=user%3Ame+is%3Aanser+%2Fusr%2Flocal%2Flib%2FR%2Fsite-library

Happy to take it offline too, and who knows, we even get to meet for a coffee
one of these days.

Hope this helps, Dirk

-- 
https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org