[R] install package version compatible with on older version of R

[Renaud Gaujoux]

Hi,

I'm trying to install Chipster (for microarray analysis: 
http://chipster.csc.fi/), which expressly relies on R 2.6.1 (for now).

So I'd like to install automatically (i.e. using a 'install.packages' like 
function) the last version of a package compatible with the running R 
version.
For example, when I'm running R-2.6.1 and want to install package 'lme4' I 
get the following warning:

In install.packages("lme4", repos = 
contrib.url("http://cran.r-project.org")) :
package ‘lme4’ is not available

Also:
available.packages(contriburl = contrib.url("http://cran.r-project.org")) 
does not return any line for package lme4.
This is because the latest version of package lme4 on CRAN depends on R 
2.9.0. However there is older versions stored on CRAN that are compatible 
with R version 2.6.1 (in subdirectory contrib/Archive/lme4).

Is there a script/package out there that does the trick, retrieving the 
list of the older versions and download the latest version compatible with 
R 2.6.1?

Thanks