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Installing CRAN binary packages with R 4.0 installed from source crashes R

Herv?,

"both" is a fairly recent addition and my guess would be that it has been guarded specifically since it is the default and installing binaries only works for the CRAN version. I didn't look at the new "both" code to see how it knows that it's the CRAN version - there is really no special "CRAN" flag. At some point we were guarding binary installs in general by checking the OS and R, but it was fragile - you could be building using the same system as we do and yet use a different compiler, so I think it's in general impossible unless we introduce some extra identification of the binaries. So, yes, if you compile R from sources yourself it is not guaranteed to be compatible with CRAN package binaries. Those are only built and tested with the CRAN R binary.

Cheers,
Simon