Duncan and Berwin, Thank you for your help.
I really wanted confirmation from someone more experienced than me that I wasn't missing something. It looks like there is no way to do this in one line in base R, and that's fine. For reference, the packages that I am doing this for are acs and choroplethr, both of which were archived today. (choroplethr depends on acs, and acs was archived due to a NOTE. I was the maintainer of chroplethr). I believe that at least a few people will still want to use choroplethr, at least for a little while. The instructions I have posted on this are consistent with what I wrote above for: # Install binary versions of acs' dependencies, then install acs from source acs_imports = c("stringr", "XML", "plyr", "httr") install.packages(acs_imports) install.packages(" https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/acs/acs_2.1.4.tar.gz") # Install binary versions of choroplethr's dependencies, then install choroplethr from source choroplethr_imports = c("Hmisc", "ggplot2", "dplyr", "R6", "WDI", "ggmap", "RgoogleMaps", "tigris", "gridExtra", "xml2", "tidyr", "tidycensus", "testthat", "choroplethrMaps", "choroplethrAdmin1") install.packages(choroplethr_imports) install.packages(" https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/choroplethr/choroplethr_3.7.3.tar.gz ") I believe that both the remotes and devtools packages have functions that can do this in one line of code. But I believe that they install all the dependencies from source. I found that there were intermittent failures with that (not in the acs or choroplethr packages, surprisingly). And also it was substantially slower (319 seconds for devtools' install_version vs. 43 seconds for the code I showed above). Berwin, your post actually made me chuckle. In the original draft of my post I wrote something like "I tried to look at what install.packages does by typing 'install.packages' but it shows me something I can't understand: > install.packages function (...) .rs.callAs(name, hook, original, ...) <environment: 0x118030cc0>" I am indeed using RStudio and I had no idea that they overwrote that function! [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.