[R-SIG-Mac] Consistency of information about installed packages

[Don MacQueen]

It appears to me that the Gui-based installer for binary format 
packages in the new R 2.1.0 binary distribution can report a package 
as installed when in fact it has not been successfully installed. 
This results from a previous attempt to install the package from 
source code that failed.

Details:

I just installed the new R 2.1.0 binary for OS X.
I installed over the existing R 2.0.1, which had also been installed 
from the binary.
Other then the fact that it was installed over the previous version, 
this is a completely fresh installation of R 2.1.0.

I started R by double-clicking R.app.
The very first thing I tried to do was to install the deldir package.
In the console, I typed
    install.packages('deldir')

The installation failed, final message was
   "installation of package 'deldir' had a non-zero exit status..."

I then went to the GUI menu item for installing binary format 
packages. I found deldir. However, it told me I had an installed 
version of deldir (there was an entry in the "Installed Version" 
column of the GUI window). Since the attempt to install from source 
had failed, this is not correct.

The version number for deldir in the GUI package installer window was 
the same as that of the attempt to install from source.
I had not installed deldir in R 2.0.1 (even if I had, it shouldn't be 
relevant, I believe)

-Don
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Don MacQueen
Environmental Protection Department
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Livermore, CA, USA