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

[Duncan Murdoch]

Jon Olav Skoien wrote:
> 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

Did you have it open at the time?  Windows won't let open files be 
removed, so that could have caused the problem.  If it's not that, it 
could be a permissions problem.  Have you tried running R as 
administrator for the install?

Duncan Murdoch