On 18/04/2013 11:07 AM, McGehee, Robert wrote:
R-developers,
I have a binary R package built using R 2.14.1 that I would like to run on R
3.0.0. Unfortunately, the original source code is unavailable, so I cannot
rebuild the package as R 3.0.0 requires.
Is there a straight forward way of converting the package (.rdb, .rdx and .rds
files) in the binary package from a 2.14.1 version to a 3.0.0 version without
the source code (perhaps uncompressing/recompressing somehow)?
Naturally, since the R code is visible, I know I can output all of the parsed
objects in the package to a text file to make a skeleton package that can then
be built/installed. Something like this:
objs <- ls(envir=loadNamespace("binaryPkg"), all.names=TRUE)
dump(objs, file="code.R", envir=loadNamespace("binaryPkg"))
However, I'd still lose all the man pages, and since I get a couple of "deparse may
be incomplete" warnings, I worry that this may be introducing additional bugs.
Is there a magic solution here, or is this a fool's errand?
I'd guess there's no magic solution. Deparsing is not perfect, so just
about any automatic solution may introduce additional bugs.
Use it as a lesson: you shouldn't use closed-source software.
BTW, you're probably aware of this, but others might not be: if this
was a CRAN package, it quite likely does have the source for the old
version still available. Take a look around the "Archive" link on the
contributed packages page. CRAN is very reluctant to delete sources
once it has made them public. So it's quite safe to install binaries
from CRAN, just not necessarily from other sources.
Duncan Murdoch
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