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

[Simon Urbanek]

On Jul 1, 2014, at 10:50 PM, G. Sawitzki <gs at statlab.uni-heidelberg.de> 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.
> 

Yes it does - that is what the post you quote refers to - the OS X GUI specifically supports installation of packages based on previous R versions in the Package Installer.

Cheers,
Simon


> 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.
> 
>   g.
> 
> 
> -- 
> G. Sawitzki
> StatLab Heidelberg
> Im Neuenheimer Feld 294
> D 69120 Heidelberg
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>