[R] Package 'data.table' in version R-3.5.0 not successfully being installed

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 26/04/2018 10:33 AM, Fox, John wrote:
> Dear A.K. Singh,
> 
> As you discovered, the data.table package has an error under R 3.5.0 that prevents CRAN from distributing a Windows binary for the package. The reason that you weren't able to install the package from source is apparently that you haven't installed the R package-building tools for Windows. See <https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/>.
> 
> Because a number of users of my Rcmdr and car packages have contacted me with a similar issue, as a temporary work-around I've placed a Windows binary for the data.table package on my website at <https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/jfox/.Pickup/data.table_1.10.4-3.zip>. You should be able to install the package from there via the command
> 
> 	install.packages("https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/jfox/.Pickup/data.table_1.10.4-3.zip", repos=NULL, type="win.binary")
> 
> I expect that this problem will go away when the maintainer of the data.table package fixes the error.

You can see the errors in the package on this web page:

https://cloud.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_data.table.html

Currently it is failing self-tests on all platforms except r-oldrel, 
which is the previous release of R.  I'd recommend backing out of R 
3.5.0 and going to R 3.4.4 if that's a possibility for you.

Yet another possibility is to use a version of data.table from Github, 
which is newer than the version on CRAN and may have fixed the errors, 
but that would require an installation from source, which not every 
Windows user is comfortable with.

Duncan Murdoch