R does not update data.table

Question

Here is my current version of data.table:

      Package                                                        LibPath Version Priority       Depends
1: data.table /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.1/Resources/library   1.9.2       NA R (>= 2.14.0)
             Imports LinkingTo
1: methods, reshape2        NA
                                                                                            Suggests Enhances    License
1: chron, ggplot2 (>= 0.9.0), plyr, reshape, testthat (>= 0.4),\nhexbin, fastmatch, nlme, xts, bit64       NA GPL (>= 2)
   License_is_FOSS License_restricts_use OS_type MD5sum NeedsCompilation Built Status
1:              NA                    NA      NA     NA              yes 3.1.0     ok

As you can see, its 1.9.2, despite http://cran.us.r-project.org listing 1.9.4 as current. I tried the following to update it, but with little effect:

update.packages()
update.packages(repos='http://cran.us.r-project.org')
update.packages(old.packages='data.table', repos='http://cran.us.r-project.org')

sessionInfo() still gives me

other attached packages:
[1] foreign_0.8-61   data.table_1.9.2 ggplot2_1.0.0  

I'm on Mac OS X, and the current version of R. Detaching the package prior to updating does not help.

Answer 1

It looks like Snow Leopard binaries are not being rebuilt: going to http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/data.table/index.html shows that 1.9.4 is available for all other platforms (source, Windows, OS X Mavericks), but only 1.9.2 is available for Snow Leopard.

I don't know whether this is something transient/known/worth reporting to CRAN maintainers or not. (Perhaps report it to the package maintainer, who will probably (a) want to know if he doesn't already and (b) report it to the CRAN maintainers if it's not an already-known issue.)

I guess the more general debugging advice is to check the CRAN info page for the package, and the actual URLs for the package type you're interested in (in this case http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/contrib/3.1/ or http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/mavericks/contrib/3.1/ ), directly.

A workaround is to use

install.packages("data.table",type="source")

(provided you have development tools installed).