[R] Upgrading

[Ivailo Stoyanov]

On Wed, 2006-12-20 at 11:37 -0500, DEEPANKAR BASU wrote:
> Thanks for the comments. I had got Thomas' message wrong the first time. Now, I have downloaded and re-installed the latest version of R. After reading the "administration and maintenance" manual, I added
> 
> deb http://cran.R-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu dapper/
> 
> to my sources.list file and used apt-get to install the latest version. After the installation, I used update.packages() from with R to update all the packages. Let me know if this was what was required or I made some mistake. 
> 
> I have two questions:
> 1. When a new version of R is released (every 6 months or so I believe) will I have to uninstall the version of R in my machine and then download and install the latest version?
> 2. When I used update.packages() from within R (after installing the latest version), I still got the following warning messages:
> 
> Warning messages:
> 1: installation of package 'cluster' had non-zero exit status in: install.packages(update[, "Package"], instlib, contriburl = contriburl,
> 2: installation of package 'mgcv' had non-zero exit status in: install.packages(update[, "Package"], instlib, contriburl = contriburl,
> 3: cannot create HTML package index in: tools:::unix.packages.html(.Library)

The "cannot create HTML package index" message hints toward insufficient
privileges -- during "update.packages()" R should run with administrator
privileges, so you have to start it via "sudo R". The reason for the
other error messages could be also unavailable source packages due to
interrupted network connectivity, but generally the best approach is to
set up a larger number of scrollback lines in the terminal (the default
could be insufficient) and to inspect the output for the specific reason
for the "non-zero exit status". Please note, that you may also need
r-base-dev (along with some other) installed in order to successfully
compile any of the packages available at CRAN.

HTH,
Ivailo