[R] Package 'data.table' in version R-3.5.0 not successfully being installed

[Fox, John]

Dear Duncan,

I think that your advice to downgrade may make sense if A. K. Singh actually needs to use data.table. In the case of the car package, for example, which depends on data.table indirectly via the rio package, data.table never gets used. As well, the examples and vignettes in data.table appear to work under R 2.5.0, so it's possible that (much of) the functionality of the package is intact.

Best,
 John

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Duncan Murdoch [mailto:murdoch.duncan using gmail.com]
> Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2018 12:14 PM
> To: Fox, John <jfox using mcmaster.ca>; Akhilesh Singh
> <akhileshsingh.igkv using gmail.com>
> Cc: r-help mailing list <r-help using r-project.org>
> Subject: Re: [R] Package 'data.table' in version R-3.5.0 not
> successfully being installed
> 
> On 26/04/2018 10:33 AM, Fox, John wrote:
> > Dear A.K. Singh,
> >
> > As you discovered, the data.table package has an error under R 3.5.0
> that prevents CRAN from distributing a Windows binary for the package.
> The reason that you weren't able to install the package from source is
> apparently that you haven't installed the R package-building tools for
> Windows. See <https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/>.
> >
> > Because a number of users of my Rcmdr and car packages have contacted
> > me with a similar issue, as a temporary work-around I've placed a
> > Windows binary for the data.table package on my website at
> > <https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/jfox/.Pickup/data.table_1.10.4-3.z
> > ip>. You should be able to install the package from there via the
> > command
> >
> >
> > install.packages("https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/jfox/.Pickup/data
> > .table_1.10.4-3.zip", repos=NULL, type="win.binary")
> >
> > I expect that this problem will go away when the maintainer of the
> data.table package fixes the error.
> 
> You can see the errors in the package on this web page:
> 
> https://cloud.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_data.table.html
> 
> Currently it is failing self-tests on all platforms except r-oldrel,
> which is the previous release of R.  I'd recommend backing out of R
> 3.5.0 and going to R 3.4.4 if that's a possibility for you.
> 
> Yet another possibility is to use a version of data.table from Github,
> which is newer than the version on CRAN and may have fixed the errors,
> but that would require an installation from source, which not every
> Windows user is comfortable with.
> 
> Duncan Murdoch