R cannot load package forecast due to namespace error

Question

I tried installing all the dependant packages and also tried another repo source as recommended in another post here.

R version 3.2.0 x64

install.packages("fracdiff")
install.packages("Rcpp")
install.packages("RcppArmadillo") 
install.packages("colorspace")
install.packages("forecast", dep=T)
install.packages("forecast", repos=c("http://cran.rstudio.com"),dep=T)
library("forecast")

then I get

Loading required package: zoo 
Attaching package: ‘zoo’
The following objects are masked from ‘package:base’:
as.Date, as.Date.numeric

Loading required package: timeDate
Error : .onAttach failed in attachNamespace() for 'forecast', details:
call: fun(libname, pkgname)
error: 4 arguments passed to .Internal(nchar) which requires 3
In addition: Warning message:
package ‘forecast’ was built under R version 3.2.1 
Error: package or namespace load failed for ‘forecast’

sessionInfo()

R version 3.2.0 (2015-04-16)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 8 x64 (build 9200)

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252  LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252    LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C                          
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252    

attached base packages:
[1] grid      stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] Hmisc_3.16-0       ggplot2_1.0.1      Formula_1.2-1      survival_2.38-1    lattice_0.20-31    zoo_1.7-12         timeSeries_3012.99 timeDate_3012.100 

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] Rcpp_0.11.6         cluster_2.0.1       magrittr_1.5        MASS_7.3-41         splines_3.2.0       forecast_6.1        munsell_0.4.2      
 [8] colorspace_1.2-6    quadprog_1.5-5      stringr_1.0.0       plyr_1.8.3          tools_3.2.0         nnet_7.3-9          parallel_3.2.0     
[15] gtable_0.1.2        latticeExtra_0.6-26 tseries_0.10-34     digest_0.6.8        gridExtra_0.9.1     RColorBrewer_1.1-2  reshape2_1.4.1     
[22] acepack_1.3-3.3     rpart_4.1-9         fracdiff_1.4-2      stringi_0.4-1       scales_0.2.5        foreign_0.8-63      proto_0.3-10

Answer 1

I tried to reproduce. I get no message about either loading timeDate or the error you see. I do get a message about loading pkg:zoo. The package loads and announces its version number. Try updating to R version 3.2.1, since that is where a new argument to nchar was introduced:

new$Text[ grep("nchar", news$Text) ]

• nchar(x, *) and nzchar(x) gain a new argument keepNA which governs how the result for NAs in x is determined. For the R 3.2.x series, the default remains FALSE which is fully back compatible. From R 3.3.0, the default will change to keepNA = NA and you are advised to consider this for code portability.