R does not update data.table

Question

Here is my current version of data.table :

  Package LibPath Version Priority Depends 1: data.table /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.1/Resources/library 1.9.2 NA R (>= 2.14.0) Imports LinkingTo 1: methods, reshape2 NA Suggests Enhances License 1: chron, ggplot2 (>= 0.9.0), plyr, reshape, testthat (>= 0.4),\nhexbin, fastmatch, nlme, xts, bit64 NA GPL (>= 2) License_is_FOSS License_restricts_use OS_type MD5sum NeedsCompilation Built Status 1: NA NA NA NA yes 3.1.0 ok 

As you can see, its 1.9.2 , despite http://cran.us.r-project.org listing 1.9.4 as current. I tried the following to update it, but with little effect:

 update.packages() update.packages(repos='http://cran.us.r-project.org') update.packages(old.packages='data.table', repos='http://cran.us.r-project.org') 

sessionInfo() still gives me

 other attached packages: [1] foreign_0.8-61 data.table_1.9.2 ggplot2_1.0.0 

I am on Mac OS X, and the current version is R. Unplugging the package before updating does not help.

Answer 1

It seems that Snow Leopard binaries are not being rebuilt: going to http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/data.table/index.html shows that 1.9.4 is available for all other platforms (source, Windows , OS X Mavericks), but only 1.9.2 is available for Snow Leopard.

I do not know if this is something short-lived / known / worthy of attention for the accompanying CRAN or not. (Possibly notify the staff member of the package who is likely to (a) want to know if he has not already done so and (b) notify the CRAN parties if this is not a known issue.)

I suggest that a more general debugging recommendation is to check the CRAN info page for the package and the actual URLs for the type of package you are interested in (in this case http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/contrib/ 3.1 / or http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/mavericks/contrib/3.1/ ).

The workaround is to use

 install.packages("data.table",type="source") 

(if you have installed development tools).