My package doesn't work for R 2.15.2

Question

I have a package called rpackage on a local (corporate) repo. When I run install.packages("rpackage") it tells me that:

Installing package(s) into ‘C:/Program Files/R/R-2.15.2/library’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
Warning in install.packages :
  package ‘rpackage’ is not available (for R version 2.15.2)

I have built this package using R CMD INSTALL --build . , released to the local repo and also ran tools::write_PACKAGES() to update the PACKAGES files. When I run R --version I get:

R version 2.15.2 (2012-10-26) -- "Trick or Treat"
Copyright (C) 2012 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
ISBN 3-900051-07-0
Platform: i386-w64-mingw32/i386 (32-bit)

And when I run R CMD INSTALL --build --version I get:

R add-on package installer: 2.15.2 (r61015)

The local repo directory structure follows the official documentation and has been working until I updated to R 2.15.2. The structure is:

\\server\folder\R\bin\windows\contrib\
    2.11\
    2.12\
    2.13\
    2.14\
    2.15\
\\server\folder\R\src\contrib\

If I run install.packages("rpackage") in R 2.15.1 I have no problems. Is there something special I need to do to get it to work with the new version of R?

I noticed the CRAN servers use a slightly different directory structure. For example, the CSIRO CRAN mirror uses:

http://cran.csiro.au/bin/windows/contrib/r-release/

Any idea about how to fix this?

Many thanks.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, neither the help files or the error message explained why this error was occurring. As it turns out, install.packages() also fails when the source package is not available, but the binary does. This is not documented behaviour (or more generously - it is not clearly documented):

For binary installs, the function also checks for the availability of a source package on the same repository, and reports if the source package has a later version, or is available but no binary version is. This check can be suppressed by options(install.packages.check.source = "no")

To fix, options(install.packages.check.source = FALSE). This can also be included in your .First function.