[R] Sometimes commands do not terminate after upgrading to R 4.0 and Ubuntu 20.04

[Bert Gunter]

Please, please, please ... RStudio is a wholly separate product from
R. Post on their website if you think Rstudio has problems. And ubuntu
concerns should be posted on r-sig-debian, not here! This list is
about R programming issues (mostly).

Bert Gunter

"The trouble with having an open mind is that people keep coming along
and sticking things into it."
-- Opus (aka Berkeley Breathed in his "Bloom County" comic strip )

On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 6:07 PM Adrien FABRE <lesgrains using gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have upgraded R (from 3.6 to 4.0) and RStudio (from 1.1 to 1.2.5) a few
> days ago, and Ubuntu from 18.04 to 20.04 yesterday.
>
> Since then, R sometimes never terminates when executing certain commands:
> ivreg (from package AER), summary (of a logit regression) and logitmfx
> (from package mfx). Sometimes these commands run fine, but most of the time
> I have to kill the process because R won't terminate the execution, even
> when pressing the red Stop button in RStudio.
>
> When I tried example('AER'), it worked fine. Then I re-installed the
> package AER. It threw 10 warnings of type In readLines(file, skipNul =
> TRUE) :  cannot open compressed file
> '/usr/lib/R/site-library/[package]/DESCRIPTION', probable reason 'No such
> file or directory' where [package] is abind, colorspace, dichromat... (but
> not AER).
>
> Since then example('AER') throws a warning: no help found for ‘AER’.
>
> I've removed and reinstalled R 4.0: it didn't help. Besides, the apt purge
> r-base* r-recommended r-cran-* threw a warning: dpkg: warning: while
> removing r-base-core, directory '/usr/lib/R/site-library' not empty so not
> removed. Also, there was a bunch of Package [package] is not installed, so
> not removed, including for [package] equal to r-cran-abind and the other
> listed above (this purge also returned a bunch of Note, selecting [package]
> for glob 'r-cran-*').
>
> I have the same bug when using R from the terminal. For the record, I was
> probably working on RStudio during the upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04. Also, I
> can't recall if this issue started after I upgraded R and RStudio (which
> would be my best guess) or after I upgraded Ubuntu (a day or two later).
>
> I hope someone can help.
>
> --
> Adrien Fabre
>
> École d'Économie de Paris/Paris School of Economics – Université Paris 1
> (R4-47)
>
> Page personnelle/Home page <http://sites.google.com/view/adrien-fabre>
> (+33/0)6.10.37.90.51
>
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>
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