r renv is not start from a blank sheet, what is the default package list for it?

Question

I just noticed that for r's package renv, when you start a brand new project with renv init select or using renv::init() for a new blank project, it is not a blank sheet.

I mean if I create a new .R file and write these lines in it:

library(datasets)
library(base)
library(graphics)
library(grDevices)

the renv won't bother to inform me I used these packages and I need to install them or record them in renv.lock.

My question is what is the complete set of these packages. which even I imported and used directly and renv will not notify me.

And if renv decide it by dynamic loading the existing packages(seems not, even if I installed data.table in system lib path, If I use data.table, renv still immediately notice that and ask me to do proper action to deal with the inconsistency)

But how about the packages installed in the renv sandbox shared by all project? It seems renv notify me the package is installed but I still need to snapshot it into renv.lock.

Answer 1

The packages you listed are all base packages, which are part of R. They can't be updated without updating R.

You can get the full list of base packages using this code:

installed.packages() |> 
  as.data.frame() |> 
  subset(Priority == "base") |> 
  rownames()
#>  [1] "base"      "compiler"  "datasets"  "graphics"  "grDevices" "grid"     
#>  [7] "methods"   "parallel"  "splines"   "stats"     "stats4"    "tcltk"    
#> [13] "tools"     "utils"

^{Created on 2024-03-15 with reprex v2.1.0}