[R] help finding a starting point to diagnose inability to install or update packages

[Larry Johnson]

It was pointed out to me by Jeff Newmiller that I should have been hitting "reply all" so that others could see the thread and make comment, corrections, or benefit from any solution.

So, I'm going to summarize the end result.

Duncan Murdoch walked me through some diagnostic steps, and what ultimately worked was to run

remove.packages("broom")
install.packages("broom")

and then repeat that for each of the four packages that attempts to load tidyverse indicated had dependency issues (I know that last sentence was ungrammatical, but you probably get my drift).

I'd still like to know why updating packages in bulk isn't working for me, but I can move ahead for now, and I'll figure out how to fix that later.

So thanks Duncan.


​Larry Johnson

Editor and Publisher

Cobb County Courier

404-664-2034

http://cobbcountycourier.com

________________________________
From: Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 25, 2021 12:41 PM
To: Larry Johnson <larry.johnson using cobbcountycourier.com>; r-help using r-project.org <r-help using r-project.org>
Subject: Re: [R] help finding a starting point to diagnose inability to install or update packages

On 25/04/2021 10:52 a.m., Larry Johnson wrote:
> Hi. Short version.  tidyverse disappeared from my packages, and won't install.  The initial failure stated I had an outdated broom package, but updates are failing too, not just on broom, but on all packages, and there is no meaningful error output on the installation failures.
>
> I typically use RStudio on Fedora 33, but the problem I'm about to describe occurs whether I use RStudio or the text version.
>
> To give you overview, here is the output from sessionInfo:
>
>
>> sessionInfo()
> R version 4.0.4 (2021-02-15)
> Platform: x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu (64-bit)
> Running under: Fedora 33 (Workstation Edition)
>
> Matrix products: default
> BLAS/LAPACK: /usr/lib64/libflexiblas.so.3.0
>
> locale:
>   [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C
>   [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
>   [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
>   [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C
>   [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C
> [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices datasets  utils     methods   base
>
> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
>   [1] htmlwidgets_1.5.3   colorspace_2.0-0    scales_1.1.1        compiler_4.0.4
>   [5] magrittr_2.0.1      R6_2.5.0            leaflet_2.0.4.1     htmltools_0.5.1.1
>   [9] tools_4.0.4         crosstalk_1.1.1     digest_0.6.27       lifecycle_1.0.0
> [13] munsell_0.5.0       rlang_0.4.10        CoprManager_0.3.7.1
>>
>
> After trying complete reinstalls of R, RStudio, and the CRAN repositories here's the last error messages I've gotten in my attempts to install and load tidyverse:
>
>
>> install.packages(c("broom", "callr", "cli", "cpp11", "dbplyr", "haven", "highr", "knitr", "pillar", "processx", "RcppArmadillo", "reprex", "tibble", "tinytex", "vctrs", "viridis", "viridisLite", "withr"))
> Install system packages...
>> install.packages("tidyverse")
> Install system packages...
>> library(tidyverse)
> Error: package or namespace load failed for ‘tidyverse’ in loadNamespace(j <- i[[1L]], c(lib.loc, .libPaths()), versionCheck = vI[[j]]):
>   namespace ‘broom’ 0.7.5 is being loaded, but >= 0.7.6 is required
>
> Attempts to install or update broom fail with no output.
>
> I've been searching for similar reports of failure here in these archives, on the RStudio forums, and on the internet and have found nothing that's a seamless match.  If I can't find anything I'll check out filing a bug report (I've never done it with R before).
>
> Any help with a starting point in diagnosing this will be appreciated.

Are you using install_github(), or otherwise installing non-CRAN
versions?  If so, stop doing that. First, run update.packages(ask=FALSE)
to make sure you are up to date.  Then delete any package that is newer
than the CRAN version, and reinstall it using the basic install.packages().

Here's code to compare versions:

CRAN <- available.packages()
here <- installed.packages()
for (i in seq_len(nrow(here))) {
   if (here[i, "Package"] %in% rownames(CRAN) &&
       package_version(here[i, "Version"]) >
         package_version(CRAN[here[i, "Package"], "Version"]))
     cat(here[i, c("Package", "Version")], "\n", sep=" " )
}

Duncan Murdoch

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