[R] debian vcd package

[Jan T. Kim]

On Thu, Jul 21, 2005 at 03:55:29PM +0100, Peter Ho wrote:
> [Apologies if you  have already read this message sent  from another 
> email address]
> 
> Hi R-Help,
> 
> I have been using R  in Linux (Debian) for the past month. The usual way 
> I install packages is through apt. Recently, a new packages "vcd" became 
> available on CRAN.  I tried installing it today and found that Debian 
> does not seem to support this package. I also found that many other 
> packages were unavailable.
> Does anyone have any recommended sites where a full list is available? 
> If none exist, what would be the best way to move ahead in installing 
> say the vcd package.
> 
> I am still a novice in using Debian and so please forgive me if some of 
> my questions may seem trivial for experienced users.

Unfortunately, the term "package" means different things in the context
of R and of Debian. A Debian package is what you install using tools like
apt etc. The traditional way of installing an R package on Linux is to

    * have R installed from source, or install the r-base-dev Debian
      package

    * download the package archive (e.g.
      http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk/R/src/contrib/vcd_0.9-0.tar.gz )

    * run the R CMD INSTALL command on it, e.g.

        R CMD INSTALL vcd_0.9-0.tar.gz

This requires having a number of development Debian packages installed,
such as gcc, g77 etc (installing r-base-dev will automatically resolve
such dependencies).

Best regards, Jan
-- 
 +- Jan T. Kim -------------------------------------------------------+
 |    *NEW*    email: jtk at cmp.uea.ac.uk                               |
 |    *NEW*    WWW:   http://www.cmp.uea.ac.uk/people/jtk             |
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