Package(s) not available for R 3.6.0

A quick question, I hope. I recently needed to clone my installation of R 3.6.0. I ran and saved installed.packages()[,1] to save a list of all the packages installed in my source installation, then ran install.packages() from the saved list in the new installation. This downloaded and installed most of the packages from the list, but in five cases, install.packages() in the new installation returned that the package was not available for R.3.6.0:

htmldeps
RForgeTools
rstudio
translations
shinyapps

Are these all outmoded libraries that I should remove from my original R installation?

Thanks in advance for the help.

Larry Hunsicker

You can search for these packages on CRAN to see if they're available, and if so, for which version they have last been built.

Searching shinyapps yields this, which indicates there's no package on CRAN by that name. Compare this with ggplot2, which yields this as its first result.

There are generally two common cases for the "not available for R version xyz"-error:

  1. The package has not been built on CRAN for your R version and operating system yet (for 3.6.0, I think most packages should be built by now for most OSes)
  2. The package is from a non-CRAN repository, like GitHub or RForge (looking at the RForgeTools in your list there). This is probably the case for the shinyapps and rstudio packages.

You might want to search Github for these packages names. For shinyapps, I get this repository from RStudio which says it's a deprecated package an replaced by rsconnect, so as long as you have rsconnect installed, you can probably safely ignore that package.

For the htmldeps package, you'll find that https://github.com/rstudio/htmldeps – I think you have this installed as a dependency for a different package, maybe shiny? Anyway, if you install the package that depends on htmldeps again, it should also install it's dependencies from GitHub if they were declared appropriately. Alternatively you can remotes::install_github("rstudio/htmldeps") if you know you need it.

2 Likes

Thanks! That was helpful.

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