I'm extremely new to Rstudio, so I apologize if i'm asking a stupid question. I've heard that if you already installed ggplot2, you should not install it once more, and that you could run into problems if you do. Since the tidyverse package includes ggplot2, and i've already installed ggplot2, will i likely run into any problems installing tidyverse?

The only packages i've installed so far are ggplot2 and readxl, i think.

CodePudding user response：

It's not a problem to install a package more than once on the same system, it's just a minor waste of time and bandwidth. (That is, I can't imagine a situation where it would actually cause a problem ...)

If you've already installed ggplot2 then install.packages("ggplot2") is completely redundant.

If you want to install the rest of the tidyverse packages then install.packages("tidyverse") is probably sensible, even if you have a few of those packages installed already (unless you're paying by the byte for network downloads). You could figure out which packages are in tidyverse and install only the ones you didn't already have, but it would be a nuisance.

There are a few packages like pacman and crancache (not itself on CRAN!) that provide slightly smarter package-installation workflows that check to see if a package is already installed/needs to be update before (re-)downloading and (re-)installing.