Getting an older version of a package

if you are on a .nix then in a terminal move to the directory that
contains the tar ball of the packages and type R CMD install
foo.tar.bz

hope this helps

Stephen Sefick

On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 5:50 PM, Le Wang <ruser.le at gmail.com> wrote:

Duncan Murdoch,

Many thank you for your reply. I did try to download the older
versions from CRAN. But I am not quite sure how to compile the source
form. I tried using the option "install package(s) from local zip
files" in R, but it didn't work. It simply gave the following msg

utils:::menuInstallLocal()

updating HTML package descriptions

On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 4:36 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:

On 24/05/2009 4:00 PM, Le Wang wrote:

Hi there,

Thanks for your time in advance.

I am using an add-on package from Cran. After I updated this package,
some of my programs don't work any more. I was wondering if there is
anything like version control so that I could use the older version of
that package; or if I could manually install the previous version and
how I could acheive it? I am not a regular R user; although it is
supposed to be very easy, after spending many hours on this, I still
haven't figured out how to proceed. Your help will be greatly
appreciated.

CRAN has the older versions of the package available in source form. You
need to download one of those and install it:  but watch out for other
packages that depend on the newer one.  In the long run, it's probably a
better investment of your time to fix your programs to work with the new
package.  (Or possibly report to the package maintainer if they have
introduced a bug.)

Prior to R 2.9.0, it was possible to install multiple different versions of
packages, but this never worked perfectly, and it has been dropped.

Duncan Murdoch