package "growth" ... where is it ?

Thank you. I have downloaded the compressed package "growth-1.tgz". I
have extracted the archive. But all my attempts to install such a
package so that I can call its functions from R command line ... have
failed. 
It is not clear to me how to operate the "install.packages" command
where the package has been already downloaded.
I  tried different parameters, and repos=NULL, but I could not
succeed.
What is the pitfall here ? 

Thank you very much,
Maura

Maura,

What operating system are you on?  If you are on Windows, you will want
the "compiled" version of the package, which is the .zip file.  The .tgz
archive is a "source" version of the package, which can be used for
example, under Linux.

In either case, you DO NOT want to extract the archive to it's
constituent components. You want to directly install the archive file.

If on Windows, you should use something like:

  install.packages("PathTo/growth.zip")

or install directly from Jim's web site:

 install.packages("http://popgen.unimaas.nl/~jlindsey/rcode/growth.zip")

Similary, if you are on Linux, you can use the same commands, just
replace the .zip with .tgz.  However, you will need 'root' access to do
this, unless you are installing to a local library tree.

This is covered in the R manuals and in the R FAQs.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz