Trouble installing R packages in Debian Jessie

Question

I'm looking at one of the Kaggle machine learning tutorials using R

I'm using Debian Jessie, and to my surprise the packaged R on Debian appears to be the very latest version, released last June

$ apt show r-recommended
Version: 3.3.1-1~jessiecran.0

$ R
R version 3.3.1 (2016-06-21) -- "Bug in Your Hair"

Congratulations to everyone involved in that!

So the tutorial starts:

# Load packages
library('ggplot2') # visualization
library('ggthemes') # visualization
library('scales') # visualization
library('dplyr') # data manipulation
library('mice') # imputation
library('randomForest') # classification algorithm

Some of these packages can be installed as further jessie packages

$ sudo apt install r-cran-ggplot2 r-cran-scales r-cran-dplyr r-cran-mice r-cran-randomforest

Leaving 'ggthemes' and 'mice'.

So I go into R and type

> install.packages('ggthemes', dep = TRUE)

And it says:

package ‘ggthemes’ is not available (for R version 3.3.1)

But

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ggthemes/index.html

exists, and among other things it says:

Version:    3.2.0
Depends:    R (≥ 3.0.0)

Which looks ok.

So what am I doing wrong, and how am I supposed to install 'ggthemes' and 'mice'?

Answer 1

Actually this just seems to be a problem with the UK mirrors. If I choose to install from the USA CA1 mirror then the packages install and build.