[R] installing package from source

[Marc Schwartz]

On Oct 24, 2013, at 11:38 AM, David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net> wrote:

> 
> On Oct 23, 2013, at 7:53 PM, Long Vo wrote:
> 
>> Hi R users,
>> Currently I want to fit a FIGARCH model to a dataset. The only package that
>> allow for it that I could find is fGarch. However it seems that the FIGARCH
>> model class fitting of this package has been moved to Oxmetrics. I tried to
>> install the old versions of it using 'tar.gz' files from CRAN archive 
>> http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/fGarch/
>> <http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/fGarch/>   but not sure how
>> it works. I tried
>> 
>> install.packages("myfilepath\fGarch_260.71.tar.gz", repos = NULL,
>> type="source")
>> 
>> And received this error:
>> 
>> Warning: invalid package './I:
_R filesGarch_260.71.tar.gz'
>> Error: ERROR: no packages specified
>> Warning messages:
>> 1: running command '"I:/01_RFI~1/INSTAL~1/R-30~1.1/bin/i386/R" CMD INSTALL
>> -l "I:\01_R files\installment\R-3.0.1\library" "./I:
_R files
>> Garch_260.71.tar.gz"' had status 1 
>> 2: In install.packages("I:\001_R files\fGarch_260.71.tar.gz", repos = NULL, 
>> :
>> installation of package ‘./I:
_R filesGarch_260.71.tar.gz’ had non-zero
>> exit status
>> 
>> Any helps on this?
>> 
> 
> I've aways specified the package names and their locations separately in my call to install.packages, but I don't know if that is always needed. It also appears that you have no "/" separator between your path and the file name.


Long is trying to install a rather old version of the source R package that contains FORTRAN code on Windows.

Besides the immediate error in the way the path was constructed in the install.packages() call, using a single backslash, which needs to be escaped:

  http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/rw-FAQ.html#R-can_0027t-find-my-file

there are likely to be issues from trying to install an old version of the package on a newer version of R, perhaps the lack of the requisite development tools for compiling FORTRAN:

  http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/rw-FAQ.html#Can-I-install-packages-into-libraries-in-this-version_003f

and other issues as well.

Depending upon how far back you need to go in package versions, there may be pre-compiled Windows binaries (.zip files) available in directories here:

  http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/



Regards,

Marc Schwartz


> 
>> Regards,
>> Long