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My work setup relies heavily on rcom library, which is so far unavailable for R 3.x (due to licensing problems).

I'm happy to keep using the R v. 2.15.3, but the install.packages doesn't fetch new packages anymore.

Is there any way of making old R download packages on demand with something like install.packages("MASS")?

Cœur
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Adam Ryczkowski
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  • good question, but I think it will be hard/hackish. – Ben Bolker May 22 '13 at 17:12
  • Possible duplicate: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12670162/is-it-possible-to-define-the-version-of-a-package-in-r-install-packages?rq=1 – Thomas May 22 '13 at 18:00
  • Not quite a duplicate, although it helps a lot. You'd still need to do some work to determine what archived versions existed/were compatible with your R version (i.e. you'll need to replace some of the functionality of `available.packages()`). – Ben Bolker May 22 '13 at 18:06
  • I don't suppose you saved your previous collection of `R` packages? If you happen to have some older versions of `R` on your machine, check the /library directory. – Carl Witthoft May 22 '13 at 18:16
  • @Carl Yes, I know this trick. But it is very manual and obviously doesn't work for packages I only recently started using. – Adam Ryczkowski May 22 '13 at 18:31
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    RDCOMClient works on R 3.0 and is very similar to rcom. Should not take much time to convert your code. – G. Grothendieck May 22 '13 at 18:58

1 Answers1

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OK, this is the fallback solution:

We can always download (windows) old packages from this location on the CRAN site and unpack the ZIPs into C:\Program Files\R\R-2.15.3\library or equivalent. But it would be cool to use some form of simple R command for doing it.

It is also possible to try using different mirrors, because mirrors are not equivalent with respect to volume of archives.

At least this is how I do it on (virtual) Windows XP 32 bit.

Adam Ryczkowski
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