Thomas, yes, I think, if installation of the new version is not safe, a warning would be a very good idea, perhaps also with a hint on how to manually install from the repository for the new version of R ?
Regards, Ulrike 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 install.packages() that a newer version of the package you were installing 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. > > -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 >>> >>> ______________________________________________ >>> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list >>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel >> >> ______________________________________________ >> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel >> > > Thomas Lumley Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics > tlum...@u.washington.edu University of Washington, Seattle > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > > -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-Wishlist%3A-install.packages-to-look-for-the-newest-version-%28PR-13852%29-tp24649240p24655521.html Sent from the R devel mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
