[R] a reliable way to check the latest version of R on CRAN?

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 5:29 PM, Yihui Xie <xie at yihui.name> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> We know old.packages() can check for updates of add-on packages, but
> is there a way to check updates of R itself? "go to R homepage" is a
> way, of course, but I hope this can be done by R.
>
> I'm not sure about the "reliable" place to check; here is a simple
> example to check from one of the CRAN webpages (kind of nasty
> approach...):

 checkRVersion in gtools does it by looking for the .tar.gz releases in CRAN:

> library(gtools)
> checkRVersion()
A newer version of R is now available: 2.11.1

 and then a bit later....

> checkRVersion()
The latest version of R is installed: 2.11.1

It returns the latest version and you can make it quiet for use in scripts.

Barry