[STATSGRASS] problems with installing maptools package (due to Foreign package)

[Roger Bivand]

On Wed, 31 Oct 2007, Hamish wrote:

>> G. Allegri wrote:
>>> The problem has come with maptools setup which har raised an error
>>> when trying to load "foreign" package for lazy loading. The exit error
>>> said
>>>
>>> "This is R 2.5.1, package 'foreing' needs >= 2.6.0"
>
> Daniel McInerney wrote:
>> The current version of foreign on CRAN is 0.8-23,
>> which depends on R >= 2.6.0
>> You could try and install a previous version of
>> foreign either (0.8-22 or 0.8-21) available under
>> the Archived Packages on the cran.r-project website.
>>
>> If you don't want to compile R 2.6, you could add
>> the sid repository to your apt-sources. You should be
>> able to safely build for lenny using the sid sources.
>
>
> R 2.6.0 should arrive in testing in the next day or few,
>  http://packages.qa.debian.org/r/r-base.html
>
> I hope there is a good reason for the version dep (which there well may be), as
> it is very annoying when things are not backwards compatible for trival
> reasons. Not everyone is running or wants to run the latest Gentoo.
>

The foreign package is "recommended", so is distributed as part of the 
2.6.0 release, and should not be present in a 2.5.1 install. The maptools 
package (which spgrass6 depends on) depends on foreign, because the 
shapelib dbf read/write functions are (now) in foreign. The current 
foreign 0.8-23 depends on R >= 2.6.0, so running update.packages() in R 
2.5.1 will *not* update it. "Recommended" packages are typically freshened 
at a release, so as to utilise improvements in "base" packages and in the 
R engine itself.

This means that the real question is how a 2.5.1 system got polluted with 
a version of foreign that is too "new", where update.packages() could not 
do it. It looks either like packaging slackness, or user intervention to 
force an update. Looking at:

Package: r-cran-foreign
Priority: optional
Section: math
Installed-Size: 652
Maintainer: Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org>
Architecture: i386
Source: foreign
Version: 0.8.22-1~etchcran.2.6.0
Replaces: r-recommended (<< 1.9.0)
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.6-6), r-base-core (>> 2.5.1)
Filename: etch/r-cran-foreign_0.8.22-1~etchcran.2.6.0_i386.deb
Size: 147498
MD5sum: 8961360323b9cbff2e1a701e31057640
SHA1: 749e3fe450a5419f6fe30191b413ea310bc5ffde
SHA256: 244857df424a8b4394466cfcda27c8d7cfec09bba3702776f88bb40e5b4ab1f6
Description: GNU R package to read/write data from other stat. systems
  This package provides functions for reading and writing data stored by
  statistical packages such as Minitab, S, SAS, SPSS, Stata, ...
  .
  This package is part of the set of packages that are 'recommended'
  by R Core and shipped with upstream source releases of R itself.

on http://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/debian/etch/Packages

the condition on this 0.8-22 build is R strictly greater than 2.5.1, which 
looks OK, and will prevent updating (same for stable).

Roger

>
> Hamish
>
>
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-- 
Roger Bivand
Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of
Economics and Business Administration, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen,
Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 95 43
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no