Package not found in repository

General
1

Can't find or install package from CRAN

I am trying to install {disk.frame} and it doesn't seem to be found in the CRAN or CRAN(extras) repo's. It's published in CRAN, as seen in the docs here.

Is there anything I should do to be able to get access to this package?

Attempt at installation:

install.packages("disk.frame")

# Warning in install.packages :
#   package ‘disk.frame’ is not available (for R version 3.5.3)

Setting the repo's

setRepositories()
# --- Please select repositories for use in this session ---


# 1: + CRAN
# 2:   BioC software
# 3:   BioC annotation
# 4:   BioC experiment
# 5: + CRAN (extras)
# 6:   Omegahat
# 7:   R-Forge
# 8:   rforge.net

Checking for {disk.frame}

ap <- available.packages()
"disk.frame" %in% rownames(ap)

# [1]FALSE
2

Hi there,

You're using 3.5.3 which came out on a specific point in time and is associated with a specific snapshot. CRAN as you linked is based on the latest version of R.

Looking at the package's cran link CRAN - Package disk.frame you will face serious dependency issues trying to install it via github and installing its dependencies. I suggest using a newer version of R or changing to a different version of R and adjusting your snapshot.

If this doesn't make sense/if you have questions let me know :slight_smile:

3

Thanks so much, this did fix my issue. I am curious though why this snapshot doesn't work when the descriptor says R >= 3.4. Could you explain a bit further on that? What exactly is a snapshot?

1 Like
4

Every time you open Rstudio or R you should see something like:

R version 4.1.0 (2021-05-18) -- "Camp Pontanezen"

As you can see it specifies my version and a specific date. That becomes a default "point" from which R will try and install packages and try and assist. To keep compiling and keep things reproducible as far as possible there are some default snapshots in place - essentially sets of packages with their respective versions etc that was available at certain times based on the version of R and that date. If this wasn't the case then you could have had serious issues of installing incompatible packages with newer or older versions of R which would lead to extremely complex library management and compiling problems.

The other reason why snapshots are so invaluable is that it gives us a frozen point in time at which we can point and keep things reproducible. When I am programming on a project that ends up in production I can guarantee that everyone who will have to install my library or project will have the identical set of packages with underlying code as I specified the snapshot and thus the respective versions.

If you ever want to get an idea of the snapshot at your disposal I suggest looking here: Home MRAN is not entirely CRAN but based on it similarly and you can specify a version and date and then see which packages with versions were available on that point.

Introduction to renv • renv renv does a lot of this too and you even have the function renv::snapshot() you can look at.

For a lot of people they never have to worry about the above but it is always important to keep in mind when you intend to share your code etc.

5

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