[R] package installation error

[Haynes, Maurice (NIH/NICHD) [E]]

Hi,

Thank you for your responses.

Héctor, I had also discovered the solution you suggested.  However, when I install files from a list (such as pckg.list), failure in the installation of one package in the list results in none of the packages later in the list being installed.  After moving the 'problem' package up one level and deleting the empty temporary directory, the name and name attribute of the problem package must be removed from the list before loading the list and calling the function install.packages() again.  With multiple failures in the list of packages, that can get tedious.

Duncan, I suspect you are correct that a file within the directory for the 'failed' package may have been locked by an antivirus program or some other background process so that the package directory cannot be renamed.  However, although I am able to disable the virus check of files on my home desktop and laptop (which I will do in the future), I have no control over such applications as the enterprise-wide antivirus program in my office desktop.  (I have administrative rights only on my local machine.)  Could the internal function normalizePath() be rewritten so that before it attempts to convert the path of a package directory to a subdirectory of the library directory it checks whether it has access to the file and pauses until it has access or for some reasonably short time?  Please excuse me if I have just displayed ignorance or arrogance.  I suspect, however, that there are more than a few users of R who have these problems and cannot control all the background applications on their machine.

Again, thank you both.


Maurice
-----Original Message-----
From: Duncan Murdoch [mailto:murdoch at stats.uwo.ca] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 02, 2009 6:32 AM
To: Héctor Villalobos
Cc: Haynes, Maurice (NIH/NICHD) [E]; r-help at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R] package installation error

Héctor Villalobos wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
> This also happens in 2.9.1 and 2.9.2. My personal solution is to look 
> under ' C:\Program Files\R\R-2.9.0\library' for a bizarre-named 
> directory (starts with an 'f' and has numbers and letters mixed) , 
> which contains the package directory (in this case 'robustbase') and 
> move it up one level (like the other packages). This is annoying, but 
> so far is the only solutions I have found.

I haven't been able to reproduce this, so all I can do is guess at the 
cause, but it looks as though a directory rename failed.  One cause for 
that would be that some application (like a virus checker, or file 
indexer, or some other background process) has a file open within the 
directory.  You could try disabling all such programs (though it's not 
easy in Windows, there are lots of ways to start them) and see if that 
helps.

Duncan Murdoch
>
>
> On 31 Aug 2009 at 9:32, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>
> > On 31/08/2009 8:53 AM, Haynes, Maurice (NIH/NICHD) [E] wrote:
> > > On Sun April 19, you posted the following on R-help:
> > >> After installing 2.9.0 I tried loading packages, but keep getting 
> the following error.
> > >>
> > >> package 'robustbase' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
> > >> Error in normalizePath(path) :
> > >>  path[1]="C:\Program Files\R\R-2.9.0\library/robustbase": The 
> system cannot find the file specified
> > >>
> > >
> > > I have had the same problem for months.  Have you found a solution?
> >
> > There have been two patch releases since 2.9.0.  Have you tried 2.9.2?
> >
> > Duncan Murdoch
> >
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> > PLEASE do read the posting guide 
> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> >
>
>
> -- 
> Héctor Villalobos <hvillalo at ipn.mx>
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