R devel - Jul 2009 - Wishlist: install.packages to look for the newest version (PR#13853)

Uwe,

I am talking binaries and Windows. I was not thinking of building 
binaries for old versions, but of looking in the new version 
repositories first, whether there is a binary that is said to be valid 
for the older version. Wouldn't it be possible to have the process look 
up a table of a newer R version for compatible binaries ?
I got stuck with R 2-8.1 (which is not that old and should not have 
stopped building binaries yet, has it?), where the binary install 
installs version 0.2 from the Austrian repository although version 0.3 
has been around for almost a month and version 0.4-1 is current.

As a workaround, I could at least refer people who are willing to test 
my current (quickly changing) design packages to the install command 
that allows them to install the packages from the newer repository 
without upgrading their R version. Could you help me out with that 
command ? I searched quite a bit and remember a help entry by you, but 
did not find anything any more about the syntax of install.packages for 
this purpose.

Regards, Ulrike

Uwe Ligges schrieb:
> 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
>
>
>
>
>
> groemping at 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 at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel

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