R：无法安装devtools软件包

Question

I try to install the devtool package with the command

install.packages('devtools')

I get the following output:

ERROR: dependency âxml2â is not available for package ârversionsâ
* removing â/usr/local/lib/R/site-library/rversionsâ
ERROR: dependency ârversionsâ is not available for package âdevtoolsâ
* removing â/usr/local/lib/R/site-library/devtoolsâ

The downloaded source packages are in
    â/tmp/RtmprD4FpZ/downloaded_packagesâ
Warning messages:
1: In install.packages("devtools") :
 installation of package ârversionsâ had non-zero exit status
2: In install.packages("devtools") :
 installation of package âdevtoolsâ had non-zero exit status

How can I add these missing dependencies? Or what am I doing wrong?

My platform / version details:

R version 3.0.2 (2013-09-25) -- "Frisbee Sailing"
Copyright (C) 2013 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)

Answer 1

Look at the error messages (and I edit the UTF-8 away here):

ERROR: dependency xml2 is not available for package rversions

ERROR: dependency rversions is not available for package devtools

and check the respective CRAN pages for rversions and xml2 to see that the latter has

Depends: R (≥ 3.1.0)

whereas you have

R version 3.0.2 (2013-09-25)

So in short: either upgrade R to a current versions, or stick with the (outdated) support packages that match your (outdated) R version.