Question

How can I install packages that are in archive, in Windows ?

http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/

When I try to install the tar.gz downloaded from the archive I get the following error:

Error in gzfile(file, "r") : cannot open the connection
In addition: Warning messages:
1: In unzip(zipname, exdir = dest) : error 1 in extracting from zip file
2: In gzfile(file, "r") :
  cannot open compressed file 'grasp_2.5-7.tar.gz/DESCRIPTION', probable reason 'No such file or directory'

Answer 1

You can try the function install_version in devtools. Let us suppose you want to install version 0.8 of ggplot2, you can call it as install_version('ggplot2', '0.8'). If you are on Windows, you can follow the instructions here to build packages from source.