[R] How to upgrade R

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Mon, 20 Oct 2003, Liaw, Andy wrote:

> What I do is to separate packages that shipped with R separate from other
> contributed packages from CRAN, so that when I upgrade, I can wipe clean the
> old R and re-install while keeping all other packages in place.
> 
> What's not clear to me is a good way of keeping two versions of R
> simultaneously (for ease of transition).  Can anyone suggest a good strategy
> for doing that on *nix?

What I do is to have them installed in different dirs, and have links to 
the bin/R files in my ~/bin directory, called names like R1.7.1, Rpat, 
Rdev.  And I have 

gannet% cat ~/.Renviron
R_LIBS=/users/ripley/R/library

so all of them can see the contributed packages I have installed (which is 
fine except where those get to be version-specific when I normally install 
in the main library tree).

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: michael watson (IAH-C) [mailto:michael.watson at bbsrc.ac.uk] 
> > Sent: Monday, October 20, 2003 5:49 AM
> > To: r-help
> > Subject: [R] How to upgrade R
> > 
> > 
> > Hi
> > 
> > I wondered what the standard procedure was for upgrading from 
> > one version of R to the next.  I currently have R 1.7.1 and 
> > want the latest release, R 1.8.0.  I am running SUSE linux 
> > 8.2.  The main thing is that I want to keep all of the 
> > libraries that I have installed for R 1.7.1 without having to 
> > re-install them.

That may not be a good idea.  At least those using saved images need to be 
reinstalled because of changes in the methods package, and the help 
translations have been improved.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595