[R] Getting an older version of a package

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 24/05/2009 4:00 PM, Le Wang wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> Thanks for your time in advance.
> 
> I am using an add-on package from Cran. After I updated this package,
> some of my programs don't work any more. I was wondering if there is
> anything like version control so that I could use the older version of
> that package; or if I could manually install the previous version and
> how I could acheive it? I am not a regular R user; although it is
> supposed to be very easy, after spending many hours on this, I still
> haven't figured out how to proceed. Your help will be greatly
> appreciated.

CRAN has the older versions of the package available in source form. 
You need to download one of those and install it:  but watch out for 
other packages that depend on the newer one.  In the long run, it's 
probably a better investment of your time to fix your programs to work 
with the new package.  (Or possibly report to the package maintainer if 
they have introduced a bug.)

Prior to R 2.9.0, it was possible to install multiple different versions 
of packages, but this never worked perfectly, and it has been dropped.

Duncan Murdoch