[R] Upgrade

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 26/10/2008 2:48 PM, rkevinburton at charter.net wrote:
> I recentlry tried to upgrade to 2.8.0. I ended up uninstalling 2.7.2 and installing 2.8.0 becuase the line in the FAQ states:
> 
> That's a matter of taste. For most people the best thing to do is to uninstall R (see the previous Q), install the new version, copy any installed packages to the library folder in the new installation, run update.packages(checkBuilt=TRUE, ask=FALSE) in the new R and then delete anything left of the old installation. Different versions of R are quite deliberately installed in parallel folders so you can keep old versions around if you wish.
> 
> The problem that I had is the library directroy in 2.8.0 was almost identical to 2.7.2. No folders that were different from the installation with 2.8.0 yet I know that I have installed packages. So I am not sure what to copy.
> 
> I also uninstalled Tinn-R and tried to reinstall it now I am getting the ".trpaths not found" error. So I tried to configure the Tinn-R installation and I get:
> 
> Warning in install.packages("Hmisc") :
>   argument 'lib' is missing: using 'F:\Users\Kevin\Documents/R/win-library/2.8'
> --- Please select a CRAN mirror for use in this session ---
> Warning message:
> package ‘Hmisc’ is not available  

Hmisc is generating errors in R 2.8.0, so there is no binary available. 
  You could try contacting the maintainer (Charles Dupont 
<charles.dupont at vanderbilt.edu>) about it.  There's not much anyone else 
can do.  (It generates a lot of warnings in 2.7.2.)

I don't know about the Tinn-R issue, but it's probably something similar.

 >
 > Upgrading shouldn't be this hard. I am doing something either out of 
order or just plain wrong. Any hints on upgrading?

Upgrading is hard because R has an aggressive release schedule, and not 
all authors/maintainers of contributed packages keep up with it.  It's 
risky to use packages that generate check warnings, because they are 
often a sign of trouble to come.  (I don't know if the Hmisc errors are 
related to the warnings or not.)

Duncan Murdoch