I just installed R 2.12.1, and when I went to run a few old programs with it, nothing worked. I got a ton of error messages saying such and such package was built before R 2.10.0 and needed to be reinstalled.
These were not just warning messages, but error messages that prevent the programs from running when they were running just fine with R 2.10.1 For some of those packages, such as deSolve, I can't find any recent versions to download to correct the problem. So my first question is, is there a way around this error that doesn't require actually installing recent versions of all those old packages? I suppose I could just use R 2.10.1, but suppose at some point I want to use both an old package and a new package that was built under R 2.12.1 in the same program? That has happened by the way. I wanted to use deSolve and yags. Since I don't have an old version of yags, I had to install the current version on CRAN, and it won't work under 2.10.1. My second question is, if not, should the R developers reconsider their strategic decision to invalidate packages just because they were built under early versions of R? I would be willing to bet that for many users, the improvements from R 2.10.1 to R 2.12.1 are minor compared with the hassle caused by the fact that their old programs will no longer work. This especially complicates application development, where the R programmer is not the end user. What developer is going to use R for his applications if he can't even be sure they will work under future versions? Joe Boyer Principal Statistician GSK Department of Statistical Sciences 8-275-3661 external: 610-787-3661 [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.