Problem with update.packages on repo with a single package

I've set up a CRAN-style repository to distribute a single package.  The 
repository contains several versions of the package, I was hoping that 
update.packages pointed at this repository would grab the highest 
version number.  In fact it returns an error:

Error in available[, "Bundle"] : incorrect number of dimensions

This is because the private function .remove_stale_dups in utils, which 
is supposed to return a copy of an available.packages matrix with no 
duplicates, does not return a matrix in the case where all available 
packages are stale except one.  To fix this I've made the following 
simple change to the utils package in my copy of R, but if I've 
overlooked something I'd be happy to hear about it:

Index: packages.R
===================================================================
--- packages.R    (revision 48465)
+++ packages.R    (working copy)
@@ -869,5 +869,5 @@
        stale_dups[i:end_i] <- wh
        i <- end_i + 1L
    }
-    if(length(stale_dups)) ap[-stale_dups, ] else ap
+    if(length(stale_dups)) ap[-stale_dups,,drop=FALSE ] else ap
}

Thanks,

Michael DiPersio

Is this R-2.9.0?
If so, please submit to R-bugs so that the bugfix does not get lost.
Otherwise, please try R-2.9.0 patched and submit a patch against that 
version.

Thank you very much!
Uwe Ligges



Michael DiPersio wrote:

I've set up a CRAN-style repository to distribute a single package.  
The repository contains several versions of the package, I was hoping 
that update.packages pointed at this repository would grab the highest 
version number.  In fact it returns an error:

Error in available[, "Bundle"] : incorrect number of dimensions

This is because the private function .remove_stale_dups in utils, 
which is supposed to return a copy of an available.packages matrix 
with no duplicates, does not return a matrix in the case where all 
available packages are stale except one.  To fix this I've made the 
following simple change to the utils package in my copy of R, but if 
I've overlooked something I'd be happy to hear about it:

Index: packages.R
===================================================================
--- packages.R    (revision 48465)
+++ packages.R    (working copy)
@@ -869,5 +869,5 @@
        stale_dups[i:end_i] <- wh
        i <- end_i + 1L
    }
-    if(length(stale_dups)) ap[-stale_dups, ] else ap
+    if(length(stale_dups)) ap[-stale_dups,,drop=FALSE ] else ap
}

Thanks,

Michael DiPersio