[ESS] I can not use install.packages

[Henric Nilsson (Public)]

James W. MacDonald wrote:

> Adding the CRAN repository to .Rprofile works great unless you do 
> something that overwrites the options list (like using setRepositories() 
> to get e.g., BioC or OmegaHat stuff).
> 
> Manually loading the tcltk package first will for whatever reason fix 
> the problem for that session, even though on Windows (unlike Linux) 
> Tcl/Tk isn't used to create the selection window.

Exactly -- it's got *nothing* to do with the `tcltk' package, and 
several other less "intrusive" workarounds have been suggested in the past.

When this issue was discussed in December 2005, Martin Mächler traced 
the problem to `select.list' (http://marc.info/?t=118536854500074&r=1&w=3).


Henric



> 
> Best,
> 
> Jim
> 
> 
> 
> Marc Schwartz wrote:
>> on 08/06/2008 09:54 PM Stephen Eglen wrote:
>>> Spencer Graves <spencer.graves at pdf.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>      What operating system do you use?
>>>>      I use Windows, and I have had the same problem for years.
>>>> However, I don't understand Emacs / Xemacs well enough to even
>>>> consider fixing it,  Moreover, I suspect that virtually all of the ESS
>>>> Gurus avoid Windows like the Black Death and are therefore largely
>>>> ignorant of the problem. 
>>>
>>> that's a good way of describing it!
>>>
>>> In my .Rprofile, I have:
>>>
>>> options(repos=c(CRAN="http://cran.uk.r-project.org/"),
>>>         papersize="a4")
>>>
>>> and I think if you do something similar, you'll not got asked for the
>>> repos location.  I'm not sure where .Rprofile is put on Windows; the
>>> closest I could see in the rw faq is that there should be a file
>>> R_HOME\etc\Rprofile.site which you can presumbly edit to store the
>>> repos.
>>>
>>> Stephen
>>
>> My recollection, when this has come up previously, is that there is a 
>> Windows specific issue with tcl/tk 'windows' when running under 
>> [X]Emacs/ESS, resulting in the lack of function.
>>
>> It does however, work on Linux. F9 in my case.
>>
>> Thus, Stephen's recommendation is a good one, in that defining the 
>> repo in your .Rprofile removes the need to define a per session repo 
>> via the tcl/tk windows interaction.
>>
>> It has been long enough now since I last ran Windows, but it seems to 
>> me that the local user-specific copy of .Rprofile was someplace in the 
>> user's "My Documents" folder tree. If you are not sharing this 
>> particular computer, it may be best to make your changes there, rather 
>> than in the site-wide file, which would be lost when upgrading to new 
>> versions of R.
>>
>> HTH,
>>
>> Marc Schwartz
>>
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>