How to build an archived package on R 3.0.0

Question

Recently R 3.0.0 was rolled out. One of the requirements was that " Packages need to be (re-)installed under this version (3.0.0) of R. "

The problem occurs when you have packages that have been archived. In an OS independent way how do you build packages like uroot ? As you can see the package is archived.

Answer 1

The easiest way to build a package from the archive is to use devtools:

library(devtools)
install_url("http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/uroot/uroot_1.4.tar.gz")

There are three challenges:

• You need to have a working development environment. On windows, this means you need Rtools; on the mac, the xcode command line tools; and on linux, the appropriate development packages

• There is currently a bug in devtools which means it doesn't find the right version of Rtools on windows. A fix is on its way to CRAN.

• There's normally a good reason that a package has been put in the archive: it's likely that it does not pass R CMD check in the current version of R, so even once you've installed it, it might not work correctly. Be careful!