Thomas Lumley wrote:
Uwe,
I think Ulrike is making a different suggestion, that install.packages()
should fetch the binary that has been built for the current version of R.
This would be a bad idea for a different reason -- in general it is not
possible to be sure that the package works with an older version of R.
The R version dependency isn't enough for two reasons. The first is that
the author may well not know that the package fails with an older
version of R and so would not have listed a dependency. The second is
that the binary versions may be incompatible even if the source versions
are compatible.
You can always download a binary package from CRAN in a browser and use
the option to install from a local zip file. Or, as Uwe suggests, get a
new version of R.
What I think might be useful if it's not too difficult is a warning from
install.packages() that a newer version of the package you were
installing is available for the current version of R.
That could be done, of course, but not that easy (see below * ). But
then, should we also warn in general (say if
[install,update,available].packages() is called) that a newer R version
is available?
I thought that has been discussed some years ago and the decision was
not to warn, but now it is 2009 and we may want something different.
(*) Not easy for former releases. For future releases, it is possible to
always look additionally into the "R-release" respository, but it means
that an additional packages file must be downloaded (which is not funny
for modem connections) in order to be able to compare versions and just
to generate a warning.
Best wishes,
Uwe
-thomas
On Fri, 24 Jul 2009 lig...@statistik.tu-dortmund.de wrote:
Ulrike,
if you install from source, you always get the most recent version of
the package given it does not depend on a newer version of R.
If you want a binary package, you also get the newest version - that was
newest at the time we stopped building binaries for that version of R.
We (or better I if we only talk about Windows, but similar for all other
platforms) cannot build for each R version any more. In that case we'd
have to build even 11 binary versions for Windows just for the R-2.x.y
series now. Binary repositories are fixed at some time (for Windows once
the first patchlevel release of the next R version is out, e.g. at the
time of the R-2.9.1 release the binary builds for R-2.8.x had been
stopped).
So please upgrade your version of R or compile yourself from sources for
the R version you need the particular package for.
Best wishes,
Uwe Ligges
groemp...@bht-berlin.de wrote:
Full_Name: Ulrike Groemping
Version: 2.9.0 (and older)
OS: Windows
Submission from: (NULL) (84.190.173.190)
When using an older version of R, packages are not found although
they are
available for newer versions of R and do work when installed with the
old
version. For example, installing DoE.base on R 2.8.1 installs version
0.2, while
CRAN is at version 0.4-1 currently. It would be nice if the install
process
would per default look for the newest version of the package and
install this
one if its R-version request allows this. (I recently found a help
list entry by
Uwe Ligges that explains how to manually install from a repository
for a newer
CRAN version, but I did not bookmark it and cannot find it any more. The
documentation does not enlighten me there.)
Regards, Ulrike
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Thomas Lumley Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlum...@u.washington.edu University of Washington, Seattle
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