[R-SIG-Mac] Old packages

[Simon Urbanek]

On Sep 6, 2011, at 4:42 AM, Peter Kupfer wrote:

> 
> Dear all,
> after a crash of my MacBook I had to install a new R version on the new book. In the meantime i worked with a Linux workstation.  For sure, in the last 24 month several packages were updated and I have no glue about installing old packages (older versions) of these. I searched in the internet but found no reliable tutorials or manuals. 
> So I want to ask, if anybody can help me out: Is there any possible solution to install old packages in an easy way? Maybe transfer the used packages from the Linux PC to the MacBook? I am looking for an easy solution and I would be superb if anybody can help me out.

If I were you, I'd simply re-install the same packages (you can use .packages(TRUE) on the Linux machine which you then simply use in install.packages in the Mac). In general older versions of packages don't necessarily work in newer versions of R so it may not be possible. You could try and see how far you get (read versions from the old library and then fetch the corresponding package sources from the CRAN archive and compile them), but it's very error prone and may not even work.

It's beyond me why you want to use old versions of packages with new R -- I understand that some people "freeze" their configuration for reproducibility reasons, but that won't work when you update R so you may as well just install the most recent versions of packages.

Cheers,
Simon