[R-sig-Debian] cannot load MASS in Etch

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 13 October 2006 at 11:51, Federico Calboli wrote:
| Hi All,
| 
| I hate to do this (because I always found the R/Debian combo exceptional and I 
| never had the time to ontribute --sorry about that--), BUT, the latest r-cran-vr 
| for Etch (testing) is
| 
| dpkg -l | grep r-cran-vr
| ii  r-cran-vr                        7.2.29-1                    GNU R package 
| accompanying the Venables and Ripley book on S
| 
| and I get the following error if I try to load MASS in R:
| 
| Error: This is R 2.3.1, package 'MASS' needs >= 2.4.0
| 
| And Etch is still at R 2.3.1 and R 2.4 has not reached it yet! The dependency 
| seems to be broken...

Yes -- I am sorry. I got a Depends: comparison wrong and several packages
built with R 2.4.0 release candidates, which therefore require an R later
than 2.3.1, slipped into testing before R 2.4.0 itself.  These packages will
not work with R 2.3.1. 

You can either

1) go to Debian unstable and install r-base-core, r-base-dev, r-mathlib, ...
   from the 2.4.0 release manually (or semi-automatically using the pinning
   feature of apt-get), or

2) go to snapshot.debian.net and get the previous version of the failing
   package (here r-cran-vr), or

3) use install.packages() or update.packages() within R to overwrite
   to package

4) wait for R 2.4.0 to hit testing.

I recommend the first choice, esp with apt-get pinning which makes it quite
easy.  Choice 2 is probably the least scary if 'pinning' is a bit
much. Choice 3 may be the easiest. Choice 4 obviously stinks.

Again, sorry about this.  I'll try hard not to do that again.

Dirk

-- 
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. 
                                                  -- Thomas A. Edison