R install package tabplot - r

Question

When I install R package, tabplot, below message has come.
My R version has updated 4.0.4 because 4.0.2 had same error.
error message is below)
Warning in install.packages :
package ‘tabplot’ is not available for this version of R
A version of this package for your version of R might be available elsewhere,
see the ideas at
https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-patched/R-admin.html#Installing-packages
Could you pls share how to resolve this issue?

Answer 1

Let's go meta for a moment:
What are you trying to do? Do you have a particular function in that archived package that you are hoping to apply to your dataset? ( which would imply that we needed to know which function. ... and a bunch of other questions.)
Or is this an effort to follow a blog or tutorial from the Web? (Again which one?)
I see this when I execute:
> install.packages("tabplot")
Installing package into ‘/home/david/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.5.1’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
Warning in install.packages :
package ‘tabplot’ is not available (for R version 3.6.3)
So at this point my guess is that the tabplot maintainer has not keep pace with the evolution of R. Because ... packages that depend on the syntax or the behavior of core R functions or the CRAN rules that might change over time depending on the considered decisions of the R Core and CRAN. That's just the way it is. There's a further sort of language/system evolution that Hadley spawned.(ggplot and magrittr/ddplyr/rlang). (Arguably the S4 tributary is in the same category. The last CRAN-accepted version was downloadable from: <search-for exact URL> at 'an URL to be named later"' produces "Archived on 2020-02-19 as check problems were not corrected despite reminders." So that's pretty recent. Perhaps we can just download a copy of the most recent "tabplot-xx.xx.xx.xx.tar.gz" file from the CRAN archive and install from local source. (Note: need to use repo=NULL in the install.packages call.)
Well, that's not working yet because of an unmet dependency on an object named clone from package:ff.
install.packages("~/Downloads/tabplot/", repos =NULL)
#--------------
Installing package into ‘/home/david/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.5.1’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
* installing *source* package ‘tabplot’ ...
** package ‘tabplot’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
** using staged installation
** R
** demo
** inst
** byte-compile and prepare package for lazy loading
Error: object ‘clone’ is not exported by 'namespace:ff'
Execution halted
ERROR: lazy loading failed for package ‘tabplot’
* removing ‘/home/david/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.5.1/tabplot’
So perhaps you can live with some drop-in R code from the expanded source on the CRAN Archive?
EDIT: So I tried figuring out how to handle that sort of error and finally decided to try changing the NAMESPACE file. It's a text file that names various functions and where the program should find them. The two lines I needed to change were the ones importing ff:::clone and ff:::is.factor.ff so change them to
importFrom(bit, clone) # the bit package has an exported version
importFrom(ff, is.factor) # removed the `.ff` from its name
And now I get:
install.packages("~/Downloads/tabplot/", repos =NULL)
Installing package into ‘/home/david/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.5.1’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
* installing *source* package ‘tabplot’ ...
file ‘NAMESPACE’ has the wrong MD5 checksum
** using staged installation
** R
** demo
** inst
** byte-compile and prepare package for lazy loading
** help
*** installing help indices
** building package indices
** installing vignettes
** testing if installed package can be loaded from temporary location
** testing if installed package can be loaded from final location
** testing if installed package keeps a record of temporary installation path
* DONE (tabplot)
The warning message is because I edited the NAMESPACE file but didn't do a full rebuild. Also note that you will not need the Rtools on a Windoze machine or the XCode and CLT on a Mac because there is no compiled code in this package.
It does appear that most of my efforts are paralleling the changes being made to the github version. See https://github.com/mtennekes/tabplot/issues/21 where the is.factor.ff issue was addressed 2 days ago. The author/maintainer says the package will be resubmitted to CRAN.
Despite claims that resubmission will occur. there does not seem to be any progress on that front. https://cran-archive.r-project.org/web/checks/2020/2020-02-19_check_results_tabplot.html However the github page suggests an installation via devtools and that succeeds for version 1.4.1 on an Ubuntu machine, despite the reports of errors in the earlier version that had been submitted to CRAN.