Why does rig require sudo to work?

[vlada79]

This is major drawback imho. Why does it need access to protected folders? Why can't it work like renv, rvm (for ruby), virtualenv (for python) -- it should be able to create isolated R environment within user accessible folders without need for sudo access.

[gaborcsardi]

Because it installs system packages (on Linux), it installs software for all users (on macOS), reads/writes the registry (on Windows), etc.

On Windows and macOS rig uses the installers build by CRAN which require admin access.

On Linux, we don't have R builds that include every system package and that can be relocated to any place on the disk, so we need root access to install the dependent system packages, and to install R into /opt.