[R-SIG-Mac] How to move existing packages?

[David Winsemius]

On Jul 1, 2014, at 1:50 PM, G. Sawitzki wrote:

> This is a late follow up to
> <https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-mac/2013-April/010045.html>
> 
> Is there a useful implementation to move existing packages?
> 
> This comes up if there is a new R release and you want your old
> collection updated, but work on a system that does versioning (e.g. OS X).
> 
> The message referred above suggests to use the GUI Package Installer,
> but at least on OS X this functionality does not exist.

> On a command level, this might be implemeted as a variant of
> update.packages() with an additional parameter old.lib.loc (or a changed
> semantics for oldPkgs: get a list of packages from old.lib.loc, and
> update these to lib.loc.
> 
> The design problem is that R does not keep a memory of where a package
> has been installed. So an iteration over a list of repositories might be
> needed.

Not sure what the issue is, and I think your understanding of the library system may be inadequate. The example in that message was using the standard Frameworks location. If you needed to get a more expansive list of R libraries, then execute:

 .libPaths()

You could also point list.dirs() at an old ../../library/ or two to gather a list of folder names.

> all <- list.dirs("/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.1/Resources/library", recursive=FALSE, full.names=FALSE)
> all[1:10]
 [1] "A2R"        "abind"      "acepack"    "Acinonyx"   "actuar"     "ada"       
 [7] "adabag"     "ade4"       "adegenet"   "adehabitat"


It doesn't seem to be that difficult to iterate over the contents of that vector.


for (loc in .libPaths() ) {
   a=rownames(installed.packages(loc))
   install.packages(a[!(a %in% rownames(installed.packages()))])
                          }



-- 
David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA