[R-SIG-Mac] Updating packages from RStudio

[peter dalgaard]

I have seen RStudio get confused occasionally on student machines. 

A potential source of trouble is that RStudio hooks some off their own bookkeeping into the install.packages() function and it gets confused. 

It may help to retry the installation from R in a terminal window, or simply to force the original version of the function by using utils::install.packages. I suspect it is not necessary to install from source (which could involve a lot of trouble for packages where you need the entire toolchain with compilers etc.)

It is also possible that you just ran into a temporary situation where the binary package hasn't been updated yet or the PACKAGES file in the CRAN directory has gotten out of sync with the actual content. I notice that "car" is published 2026-02-03 (because change of maintainer, I suppose). In that case, just waiting should work.

-pd

> On 4 Feb 2026, at 00.02, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I've never seen a failure in those circumstances.
> 
> You should post full details of the next failure:  what you did, what versions of R and RStudio you were using, what went wrong.
> 
> There's a good chance this is purely an RStudio bug, in which case it would be off-topic here, so if you can reproduce the problem using R.app, that would be important.
> 
> Duncan Murdoch
> 
> On 2026-02-03 4:37 p.m., Manuel Spínola wrote:
>> When I try to update packages from RStudio using the menu on macOS, some
>> packages fail to install.
>> I can fix the issue by reinstalling them manually from source, for example:
>> install.packages("car", type = "source")
>> I am wondering whether this is a known macOS/RStudio issue (e.g., related
>> to binary vs source packages), and whether there is a recommended
>> workaround or setting.
>> R version 4.5.2 (2025-10-31) -- "[Not] Part in a Rumble"
>> Platform: aarch64-apple-darwin20
>> Manuel
>> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> R-SIG-Mac mailing list
> R-SIG-Mac using r-project.org
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac

-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Office: A 4.23
Email: pd.mes using cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd using gmail.com