[R] update MASS

[Ramón Casero Cañas]

Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> On Sat, 1 Oct 2005, Ramón Casero Cañas wrote:
> 
>> I'd like to update MASS from version 7.2-11 to version 7-2.19. I am
>> running R 2.0.1 on ubuntu, that installs MASS with the package r-cran-vr.
> 
> 
> First, MASS is part of VR, so it is VR you update.

Thanks Prof Ripley, and Kjetil too, for your help. I am sure this was
obvious to anyone but me, but I found the wording in

http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/MASS4/Software.html#RUnix

a bit confusing. May I suggest that where it says ``To get the very
latest version, use update.packages() from an R session'', it could be
added: ``Note also that the current version of your R base system may
limit the update, i.e. if the R base system you are running is too old,
you will not be able to get the latest version of MASS. You can check
the dependencies of MASS from the <a
href="http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Descriptions/VR.html">Description
file of VR at CRAN</a>''.

And maybe right before ``As the VR bundle is now recommended'' it could
say ``MASS does not have its own package, but comes bundled with other
libraries in a package called VR. Thus if you want to use/update MASS
you need to install/update VR''.

> Your R is seriously only of date.  You might want to wait a week and
> then install 2.2.0.

Searching a bit more I have found that this problem has been brought up
in the ubuntu forums

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-49178.html

i.e. that the GNU R version is too old. As a temporal fix, it is
suggested to install the sarge .deb packages from
http://cran.r-project.org/ and then Linux/debian/stable, overlooking the
dependencies error with libc6.

I'll update to 2.2.0 in a week, but for the moment I did the former and
it seems to work with the code I was writting.

Cheers,

-- 
Ramón Casero Cañas

web:    http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~rcasero/