[Feature Request] support `remove.packages`

[sukanka]

Is there any plan to implement remove.packages()?
I just installed r-bspm from BioArchLinux, and tried to install an R package.
It's great that it calls pacman to install the package, but when I run remove.packages(), it does not call pacman to remove the packges.

r$> remove.packages("ggplot2")
Removing package from ‘/home/sukanka/.local/lib/R/4.2’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
Error in find.package(pkgs, lib) : there is no package called ‘ggplot2’

I think it could be better if remove.packages also calls pacman first.

[Enchufa2]

We don't do that by choice, and this is a thoughtful decision based on several reasons. These are the main ones:

1. One of our use cases is multitenancy, i.e., several users sharing the system library in a Linux server. In this scenario, we want easy installation, but not-so-easy uninstallation. Because we don't want one user to remove packages that another user may need.
2. If we did this, imagine that you have an obsolete version of a package installed in your user library. At some point, this package could stop working with other up-to-date packages in the system library. You do have a copy of the proper version of the package in the system library (because your package manager is always watching over this). But your user library always takes precedence, so the installation doesn't work (this is not hypotetical, we know this has happened because we received bug reports for that). The solution is simple: uninstall the obsolete package version from your user library. But this integration would require you to call remove.packages two times ---one for the (good) system package, another for the user package---, and then install.packages to install the (good) system package back. And note that, in this process, you could lose a bunch of packages dependent on the first one that needs to be reinstalled. So... a real mess.

Therefore, it is possible to remove packages from the system, but it requires, by design, a thoughtful call to the proper function, which is bspm::remove_sys().

[sukanka]

Oh, I get it! Thanks for your clear explanations!