[Feature Request] Compress R packages and Unpack to Set Directory for Later Use?

[emstruong]

Hello,

Thanks for the great package.

I'd like to request the ability to compress all the R packages into some archive file and then for renv to be able to later unzip this archive to some set directory, then use the set directory.

I know this is a peculiar request, but it's a very helpful feature for in high performance computing contexts and I imagine in any case where one is doing massively distributed computing.

Let's say that someone stores their R studio project (with renv enabled) on a networked drive. Then as more and more systems try to access the networked drive to do their computations, this can dramatically increase the i/o load on the networked drive--presumably both because (1) the way renv starts-up by default is heavy on the i/o and (2) regardless of renv, loading many R packages into memory is inherently a high i/o load--such that everything is brought to a halt.

If it were possible to archive the R packages, then to ask renv to unpack it to system's local drive (as opposed to the network drive), it would be really helpful. Additionally, the reason why I'd like to request this feature of renv as opposed to attempting a custom tar/dar script solution is to ensure both the correctness and reproducibility of the archiving and decompressing.

[kevinushey]

This seems hard to orchestrate from renv. Couldn't you configure renv to use a local library path on these systems, and then manually copy packages from your network drive to this local library path as appropriate?