[Rd] Check for updates under Windows (Was: a reliable way to check the latest version of R on CRAN?)

[Yihui Xie]

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 <xieyihui at 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 <xie at 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-help at 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 <xieyihui at gmail.com>
Phone: 515-294-2465 Web: http://yihui.name
Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA