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Upgrade

3 messages · rkevinburton at charter.net, Duncan Murdoch, Gabor Grothendieck

#
I recentlry tried to upgrade to 2.8.0. I ended up uninstalling 2.7.2 and installing 2.8.0 becuase the line in the FAQ states:

That's a matter of taste. For most people the best thing to do is to uninstall R (see the previous Q), install the new version, copy any installed packages to the library folder in the new installation, run update.packages(checkBuilt=TRUE, ask=FALSE) in the new R and then delete anything left of the old installation. Different versions of R are quite deliberately installed in parallel folders so you can keep old versions around if you wish.

The problem that I had is the library directroy in 2.8.0 was almost identical to 2.7.2. No folders that were different from the installation with 2.8.0 yet I know that I have installed packages. So I am not sure what to copy.

I also uninstalled Tinn-R and tried to reinstall it now I am getting the ".trpaths not found" error. So I tried to configure the Tinn-R installation and I get:

Warning in install.packages("Hmisc") :
  argument 'lib' is missing: using 'F:\Users\Kevin\Documents/R/win-library/2.8'
--- Please select a CRAN mirror for use in this session ---
Warning message:
package ?Hmisc? is not available  

Upgrading shouldn't be this hard. I am doing something either out of order or just plain wrong. Any hints on upgrading?

Thank you.

Kevin
#
On 26/10/2008 2:48 PM, rkevinburton at charter.net wrote:
Hmisc is generating errors in R 2.8.0, so there is no binary available. 
  You could try contacting the maintainer (Charles Dupont 
<charles.dupont at vanderbilt.edu>) about it.  There's not much anyone else 
can do.  (It generates a lot of warnings in 2.7.2.)

I don't know about the Tinn-R issue, but it's probably something similar.

 >
 > Upgrading shouldn't be this hard. I am doing something either out of 
order or just plain wrong. Any hints on upgrading?

Upgrading is hard because R has an aggressive release schedule, and not 
all authors/maintainers of contributed packages keep up with it.  It's 
risky to use packages that generate check warnings, because they are 
often a sign of trouble to come.  (I don't know if the Hmisc errors are 
related to the warnings or not.)

Duncan Murdoch
#
You don't have to uninstall R 2.7.2. I usually keep a few past versions of
R in case I need to go backward.  There are two batchfiles at

http://batchfiles.googlecode.com

called movedir.bat and copydir.bat  .  They are self contained so you
only have to put whichever you intend to use anywhere in your path.
After installing R 2.8 using the automated installer check that

C:\Users\JoeDoe\Documents\R\win-library\2.8

was created and then

cd to the win-library folder, i.e. to C:\Users\JoeDoe\Documents\R\win-library
and then just issue this command:

   movedir 2.7 2.8

or this command:

   copydir 2.7 2.8

The first alternative, movedir, will move the packages from your 2.7
library to your 2.8 library
(so they won't be in your 2.7 any more) and is very fast -- the whole thing
only takes a few seconds.  Its the one I usually use.
The second alternative, copydir, will put a copy in 2.8 leaving the
2.7 one there but
is much slower since it has to copy all the packages over.  Neither
will overwrite
any packages it finds in the 2.8 folder.

Once you do that just go back into R 2.8 and do Packages | Update

On the batchfiles home page there are also links to other alternatives
that various people have proposed for upgrading.
On Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 2:48 PM, <rkevinburton at charter.net> wrote: