[Rd] Reproducible use case for R crash after updating R

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 11-05-18 3:19 AM, Andreas Borg wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'd like to add another suggestion:
>
> Henrik Bengtsson schrieb:
>> 6. User starts R.  R crashes with "Fatal error: unable to restore
>> saved object in .RData" because 'fortunes' is not installed for this
>> new version of R.  There is also an error message before that
>> reporting "Error in loadNamespace(name) : there is no package called
>> 'fortunes'".
>>
>>
> I would find it very useful if the installer offered an option to copy
> extension packages from the old version to the new version. Apart from
> possibly preventing this type of crash, it would save the hassle of
> reinstalling or copying the extension packages one regularly uses.

Often the old packages won't work in the new version, and you need to 
call update.packages(checkBuilt=TRUE) to update them.  That means that 
to install R, you would need an active Internet connection (or at least 
the ability to check for one).  All of that is possible, but it's not 
trivial to get it to work smoothly, and to handle errors when things go 
wrong (e.g. packages that are no longer available).

I think it would be better to move all of those details out of the 
installer, and into a user contributed package.  Then the maintainer of 
that package will handle the headaches, not me.

Duncan Murdoch