Dear R developers, I asked this question in r-help list but have not got a definite solution yet, and I think it might be more appropriate to ask developers or CRAN maintainers directly. Many software packages often have a menu item like "Check for updates" under the "Help" menu, e.g. Filezilla and Firefox, and I believe it is also necessary for R (at least for R GUI under Windows). Note all users really have to update R, but we should make it clearer to them that new versions are available. Yes, they can go to R homepage to check by themselves, but my experience tells me it is rarely the case. Therefore, I wish RGui could gain a new menu to check for updates of R. Thanks very much!
Regards, Yihui -- Yihui Xie <xieyi...@gmail.com> Phone: 515-294-2465 Web: http://yihui.name Department of Statistics, Iowa State University 2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Yihui Xie <x...@yihui.name> Date: Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 11:29 AM Subject: a reliable way to check the latest version of R on CRAN? To: R Help <r-h...@r-project.org> Hi all, We know old.packages() can check for updates of add-on packages, but is there a way to check updates of R itself? "go to R homepage" is a way, of course, but I hope this can be done by R. I'm not sure about the "reliable" place to check; here is a simple example to check from one of the CRAN webpages (kind of nasty approach...): x = readLines("http://cran.r-project.org/sources.html";) # the version number is in the next line of 'The latest release' rls = x[grep("latest release", x) + 1L] newver = gsub("(.*R-|\\.tar\\.gz.*)", "", rls) oldver = paste(getRversion(), collapse = ".") # new version available? compareVersion(newver, oldver) == 1L Thanks! Regards, Yihui -- Yihui Xie <xieyi...@gmail.com> Phone: 515-294-2465 Web: http://yihui.name Department of Statistics, Iowa State University 2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
