[FORGED] r-base is already the newest version (3.5.2-1bionic)

Rolf,

I think it may help to read-up on dpkg and apt. Instead of 'whereis' do

   dpkg -l r-base-core

Now *that* was a revealing suggestion!  I did that and got:

Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name             Version       Architecture  Description
+++-================-=============-=============-======================================
ii  r-base-core      3.5.2-1bionic amd64         GNU R core of statistical computation 

So indeed the installation had not actually been done.

The nature of the message prompted me to try

     sudo apt purge r-base-core

which ran and said that it was removing a whole lot of stuff.

I then tried

      sudo apt-get install r-base-core

which ran and gave a whole lot more output than was previously produced 
when I ran "sudo apt-get install r-base".  (Note: I had been typing
*r-base* and NOT *r-base-core*.)  It indicated that it was doing lots of 
stuff that looked promising in respect of actually *installing* R.

And in fact the promise was fulfilled.  I then started R and got:

R version 3.5.2 (2018-12-20) -- "Eggshell Igloo"
Copyright (C) 2018 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)

Ta-da!!!

Was the problem essentially that I had been saying

"sudo apt-get install r-base" rather than

"sudo apt-get install r-base-core"?

Is it possible that the latter is needed if R has previously been 
installed from source, but otherwise just "r-base" is sufficient?

If so, it might be useful to note this in the instructions in

https://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/README.html

<SNIP>

Anyhow, I now seem to be out of the woods, at long last.  Thanks for 
setting me on the path.

cheers,

Rolf

Honorary Research Fellow
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276