[R] Too many warnings when updating R

[Peter Dalgaard]

A Lenzo wrote:
> Hello friends,
>
> I loaded R 2.4.1 onto a Fedora Core 6 Linux box (taking all defaults).  Then
> I ran these commands from within R:
>
> options(CRAN="http://cran.stat.ucla.edu")
> install.packages(CRAN.packages()[,1])
>
> As a new user of R, I was shocked when I finished loading R and discovered
> the following message:
>
> "There were 50 or more warnings (use warnings() to see the first 50)"
>
>   
Let me get this straight: You install last year's R on last year's 
Fedora, then install over 1000 unspecified packages and you are shocked 
that you get warnings?

> In addition to this, I saw errors such as this one:
>
> "ERROR: lazy loading failed for package 'PerformanceAnalytics'
>
> What is this lazy loading?  More importantly, do I have to worry about all
> these warnings?  I am intimidated by the idea that I have to go back and fix
> each and every one in order to have a clean R update.  Shouldn't the update
> with CRAN "just work?"  Or is there something really important that I am
> missing?
>   
Well, you need to know what you're doing. At the very least, notice what 
the warnings say and decide whether they point to real trouble or are 
just what they say they are: warnings. If you are worried about  
investigating all the packages, maybe install what you really need first.

And no, you can't expect a repository like CRAN to keep track of all 
versions of R on all versions of all OS's. In each individual case, a 
human maintainer is responsible for fixing problems and he/she may or 
may not be around to fix issues.

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Øster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K
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