[Rd] error in install.packages() (PR#14042)

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 11/4/2009 11:05 AM, michael.m.spiegel at gmail.com wrote:
> Full_Name: Michael Spiegel
> Version: 2.10
> OS: Windows Vista
> Submission from: (NULL) (76.104.24.156)
> 
> 
> The following error is produced when attempting to call install.packages.  Here
> is the results of the traceback:
> 
>> source('http://openmx.psyc.virginia.edu/getOpenMx.R')
> Error in f(res) : invalid subscript type 'list'
>> traceback()
> 7: f(res)
> 6: available.packages(contriburl = contriburl, method = method)
> 5: .install.winbinary(pkgs = pkgs, lib = lib, contriburl = contriburl, 
>        method = method, available = available, destdir = destdir, 
>        dependencies = dependencies, ...)
> 4: install.packages(pkgs = c("OpenMx"), repos = repos)
> 3: eval.with.vis(expr, envir, enclos)
> 2: eval.with.vis(ei, envir)
> 1: source("http://openmx.psyc.virginia.edu/getOpenMx.R")
> 
> I've tracked the error down to somewhere in available.packages defined in
> src\library\utils\R\packages.R.  I am guessing that the error in version 2.10
> has something to do with the change: "available.packages() gains a 'filters'
> argument for specifying the filtering operations performed on the packages found
> in the repositories."

I've found the error, and will fix and commit to R-devel and R-patched.

For future reference:  the problem was that it assigned the result of 
sapply() to a subset of a vector.  Normally sapply() simplifies its 
result to a vector, but in this case the result was empty, so sapply() 
returned an empty list; assigning a list to a vector coerced the vector 
to a list, and then the "invalid subscript type 'list'" came soon after.

Duncan Murdoch