UPPAIR

a tool for:

Universal
Package
Parsing
And
Installation
(for)
R

why?

For some situations, like:

• trying to strictly follow the environment version given in a paper several years ago

people have a demand for install outdated specified versions of R packages.

but as the answer mentioned in pak's issue #668:

"this is how CRAN works. They typically only include the latest versions of packages in their package metadata, "

most tools only handle non-outdated versions.

the only way I found to achieve such goal is:

• go to the Archive directory find the packages and check the version and date,

• download the file and install it through:

  install.packages("<package_name_and_version>.tar.gz", repos = NULL)

however, this process may further cause dependency problems, making the installation process painful.

so I hope there'll be a tool that can handle this process better, which is why UPPAIR born.

known issues

• can not parse which package is a basic package(e.g. grid), lead to installation failed

• forgot to switch the latest package installation, now only packages from archive will be installed, the packages from latest will throw an error about ERROR: no packages specified

• some package whose dependencies includes version requirements can not be parsed(e.g. gtable, rlang, scales, withr in ggplot2 Imports: digest, glue, grDevices, grid, gtable (>= 0.1.1), isoband, MASS, mgcv, rlang (>= 0.4.10), scales (>= 0.5.0), stats, tibble, withr (>= 2.0.0))

• program design and code organization may need to be optimized

• only command tree and add are implemented

• no test included

how?

...