[Rd] robustness of install.packages/update.packages (was Re: bug in L-BFGS-B? (PR#8099))

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sun, 28 Aug 2005, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

>> After redirecting R 2.1.1 on my laptop to use
>>        http://cran.au.r-project.org/
>> for the CRAN repository, the install.packages() command ran without
>> problems.  I issued the command `library(MASS)' and tried out the
>> example from fitdistr on that machine (same strange result for second
>> command and warning messages were issued).  So I said
>> update.packages()  and that command failed when it wanted to update
>> the MASS package.  So I detach()'ed MASS and re-ran update.packages()
>> and again it failed.  So I exited R 2.1.1 and restarted it again
>> (probably I should have unloaded the namespace of MASS??) and then the
>> update.packages command worked.
>
> Yes, and that *is* in the rw-FAQ.
>
>> However, update.packages() wanted to update quite a few packages
>> besides MASS (the other packages in the VR bundle, nlme, lattice &c).
>> Once it failed on MASS, it terminated with an error and did not update
>> any of the other packages.  Would it be possible to robustify
>> update.packages behaviour such that it would continue in such
>> situations with updating the remaining packages?
>
> Not a good idea. Better to follow the FAQ.  At that point the dependencies
> have been worked out and will not be re-computed if a package installation
> fails.

I checked, and I am unable to reproduce this.  I get

> library(MASS)
> install.packages(c("MASS", "tree"))
trying URL 
'http://cran.at.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/2.2/tree_1.0-19.zip'
Content type 'application/zip' length 144676 bytes
opened URL
downloaded 141Kb

package 'tree' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked

The downloaded packages are in
         C:\Documents and Settings\ripley\Local 
Settings\Temp\Rtmp13777\downloaded_packages
updating HTML package descriptions
Warning message:
package MASS is in use and will not be installed

which seems perfectly reasonable.



-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595