John Mount has a public service announcement:
In a lot of our R writing we casually say “install from CRAN using
install.packages('PKGNAME')” or “update your packages by usingupdate.packages(ask = FALSE, checkBuilt = TRUE)(and answering ‘no’ to all questions about compiling).”We recently became aware that for some users this isn’t complete advice.
The above depends on your R install pointing to a repository that is in fact up to date. To check what repositories you are using please use the command
options('repos').
The specific example here is around the Microsoft R Archive Network (MRAN), which stays at fixed dates. This is for a good reason: because it helps companies standardize on a known set of versions of R packages by default. That way you don’t have version 1.8 of a package in dev and then get 1.9 in production and find out that something broke between the two versions.