R help - Jun 2013 - Windows R_LIBS_USER confusion under R-3.0.1

I would appreciate ideas about MS Windows install issues. I'm at our stats
summer camp and have been looking at a lot of Windows R installs and there
are some wrinkles about R_LIBS_USER.

On a clean Win7 or Win8 system, with R-3.0.1, we see the user library for
packages defaulting to  $HOME/R/win-library.

I think that's awesome, the way it should be. Yea! But it does not appear
that way on all systems, and I think it is because of lingering
after-effects of previous R installs.

In previous versions of R, R_LIBS_USER defaulted to
$HOME/AppData/Roaming/... That was not so great because it was (default)
hidden to the students and they were disoriented about how something that
does not exist (or show) could hold packages. Aside from teaching them how
to configure the file manager, we could navigate that.

The problem is that with R-3.0.1, sometimes we are seeing the user package
installs going into $HOME/AppData/Roaming/....

In the user account, there is no $HOME/.Rprofile or $HOME/.Renviron.

I hate to tell non-expert users that they ought to go fishing in the
Windows registry, but I'm starting to suspect that is what they ought to
do.  What do you think?

PJ

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science      Assoc. Director
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504      Center for Research Methods
University of Kansas                 University of Kansas
http://pj.freefaculty.org               http://quant.ku.edu

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On 12.06.2013 16:35, Paul Johnson wrote:
> I would appreciate ideas about MS Windows install issues. I'm at our
stats
> summer camp and have been looking at a lot of Windows R installs and there
> are some wrinkles about R_LIBS_USER.
>
> On a clean Win7 or Win8 system, with R-3.0.1, we see the user library for
> packages defaulting to  $HOME/R/win-library.
>
> I think that's awesome, the way it should be. Yea! But it does not
appear
> that way on all systems, and I think it is because of lingering
> after-effects of previous R installs.
>
> In previous versions of R, R_LIBS_USER defaulted to
> $HOME/AppData/Roaming/... That was not so great because it was (default)
> hidden to the students and they were disoriented about how something that
> does not exist (or show) could hold packages. Aside from teaching them how
> to configure the file manager, we could navigate that.
>
> The problem is that with R-3.0.1, sometimes we are seeing the user package
> installs going into $HOME/AppData/Roaming/....
>
> In the user account, there is no $HOME/.Rprofile or $HOME/.Renviron.
>
> I hate to tell non-expert users that they ought to go fishing in the
> Windows registry, but I'm starting to suspect that is what they ought
to
> do.  What do you think?

There is nothing in the registry, but maybe some startup file in the 
current working directory? Some declaration of environment variables 
somewhere else?

Best,
Uwe Ligges

>
> PJ
>