The behaviour you quote is the documented behaviour in R 2.5.1.
Please do RTFM, especially ?install.packages:
'install.packages' can be used to install new packages/bundles. It
takes a vector of names and a destination library, downloads the
packages from the repositories and installs them. (If the library
is omitted it defaults to the first directory in '.libPaths()',
with a warning if there is more than one.) If 'lib' is omitted or
is of length one and is not a (group) writeable directory, the
code offers to create a personal library tree (the first element
of 'Sys.getenv("R_LIBS_USER")') and install there.
Detection of a
writeable directory is problematic on Windows: see the Warning
section.
Now, it is entirely possible that Windows is mis-reporting on the
permissions available, but that would not be a bug in R and one that is
warned about (twice) on the help page.
That you can write a specific file there is not the issue, as the help
page explains in detail. You need to be able to write specfic types of
files there, and a recent WinXP patch stops you being able to do that on
networked drives.
On Mon, 13 Aug 2007, russell-lenth at uiowa.edu wrote:
> Oops -- I meant R version 2.5.1, not 1.5.1. My apologies.
So you did mean 1.4.1? Two separate major version errors suggest that you
really are insufficiently unaware of what you are using.
--
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595