I have seen RStudio get confused occasionally on student machines. A potential source of trouble is that RStudio hooks some off their own bookkeeping into the install.packages() function and it gets confused.
It may help to retry the installation from R in a terminal window, or simply to force the original version of the function by using utils::install.packages. I suspect it is not necessary to install from source (which could involve a lot of trouble for packages where you need the entire toolchain with compilers etc.) It is also possible that you just ran into a temporary situation where the binary package hasn't been updated yet or the PACKAGES file in the CRAN directory has gotten out of sync with the actual content. I notice that "car" is published 2026-02-03 (because change of maintainer, I suppose). In that case, just waiting should work. -pd > On 4 Feb 2026, at 00.02, Duncan Murdoch <[email protected]> wrote: > > I've never seen a failure in those circumstances. > > You should post full details of the next failure: what you did, what > versions of R and RStudio you were using, what went wrong. > > There's a good chance this is purely an RStudio bug, in which case it would > be off-topic here, so if you can reproduce the problem using R.app, that > would be important. > > Duncan Murdoch > > On 2026-02-03 4:37 p.m., Manuel Spínola wrote: >> When I try to update packages from RStudio using the menu on macOS, some >> packages fail to install. >> I can fix the issue by reinstalling them manually from source, for example: >> install.packages("car", type = "source") >> I am wondering whether this is a known macOS/RStudio issue (e.g., related >> to binary vs source packages), and whether there is a recommended >> workaround or setting. >> R version 4.5.2 (2025-10-31) -- "[Not] Part in a Rumble" >> Platform: aarch64-apple-darwin20 >> Manuel >> > > _______________________________________________ > R-SIG-Mac mailing list > [email protected] > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac -- Peter Dalgaard, Professor, Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark Phone: (+45)38153501 Office: A 4.23 Email: [email protected] Priv: [email protected] _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Mac mailing list [email protected] https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
