[R] install.packages() - old version deleted, new version did not install

[Jon Olav Skoien]

On 12/17/2010 6:22 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> On 17/12/2010 11:13 AM, Jon Olav Skoien wrote:
>> Dear list,
>>
>> (R 2.12.0, Windows 7, 64bit)
>>
>> I recently tried to install a new package ("spacetime"), that depends on
>> "sp" among others. I already had the last one installed, but there was
>> probably a newer version on CRAN, so the command
>> > install.packages("spacetime")
>> also gave me:
>> also installing the dependencies ‘sp’, ‘zoo’, ‘xts’
>>
>> sp was already loaded in this session, so installation failed:
>> package 'sp' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
>> Warning: cannot remove prior installation of package 'sp'
>>
>> Unfortunately, the warning should rather say:
>> "cannot completely remove prior installation of package 'sp'"
>> R managed to remove most of the prior installation of sp, except for the
>> .dll. I could go on using sp in the existing sessions, but not load the
>> package in a new session or open the help pages. This has happened to me
>> several times, and the only solution I have found to this is to close
>> all R-sessions and install the package again. This is normally ok, but
>> this time I had some long-time computations running in another R-session
>> that I did not want to interrupt. For the next time, is there a way to
>> reinstall a package without interrupting running R-sessions?
>>
>> For me it seems like the cause of the problem could have been solved by
>> checking if the .dll can be removed before removing the rest of the
>> package, by adding something like the following in utils:::unpackPkgZip?
>> if (unlink(paste(instPath,"/libs/x64/sp.dll", sep = "")) != 0)
>> warning("cannot remove...")
>> before
>> ret<- unlink(instPath, recursive = TRUE) (line 95)
>> x64 in the path would have to be changed to something architecture
>> dependent...
>
>
> Could you try out the new 2.12.1 release? I recall hearing that 
> something like this had changed, but I can't spot the NEWS item right 
> now.
>
> Duncan Murdoch

It seems it didnt change yet...
I installed 2.12.1 (on a different computer, still Windows, but Vista 
and 32 bit), and after installing and loading sp in one session, I 
opened a new session and got:

R version 2.12.1 (2010-12-16)
Copyright (C) 2010 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
ISBN 3-900051-07-0
Platform: i386-pc-mingw32/i386 (32-bit)
............................

 > install.packages("sp")
Installing package(s) into ‘C:\Users\Jon\Documents/R/win-library/2.12’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
--- Please select a CRAN mirror for use in this session ---
provo con l'URL 
'http://cran.at.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/2.12/sp_0.9-76.zip'
Content type 'application/zip' length 997444 bytes (974 Kb)
URL aperto
downloaded 974 Kb

package 'sp' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
Warning: cannot remove prior installation of package 'sp'

The downloaded packages are in
C:\Users\Jon\AppData\Local\Temp\RtmpCTJeBk\downloaded_packages
 > library(sp)
Errore in library(sp) : non c'è alcun pacchetto chiamato 'sp'
 >

The error message is the same as earlier, there is no package called 
"sp", the attempt to install it again removed the old version except for 
the .dll.

Jon