Question

I’m trying to write some SPARQL queries in R using the rrdf package. However, I get this error every time I try to load the library.

Error: package 'rrdflibs' 1.1.2 was found, but == 1.1.0 is required by 'rrdf'

Not sure why they didn’t write it as >= 1.1.0. Is what they did a good programming practice?

Answer 1

Go to http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/rrdflibs/ to retrieve an older version. This is a source archive, so you will have to be able to build from source (typically easy on Linux, pretty easy on MacOS, and hard on Windows; you can use the http://win-builder.r-project.org/ service to build a Windows binary if necessary).

Actually, based on a quick look at the package, I think you should be able to install in this case (even on Windows without Rtools) via

download.file("http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/rrdflibs/rrdflibs_1.1.0.tar.gz",
   dest="rrfdlibs_1.1.0.tar.gz")
install.packages("rrfdlibs_1.1.0.tar.gz",repos=NULL,type="source")

because the package doesn’t actually contain anything that needs to be compiled.

Don’t know about programming practice, you’d have to ask the authors if they had some particular reason to do it that way. (See maintainer("rrdf").) Maybe they knew the versions would not be backward/forward compatible?