How to get out of R’s problem of “dependency hell”

A Step by step solution

Anyone who has worked with R statistical programming environment will have learned or acknowledged that one of the problems of working with R software for data analysis and coding is its numerous dependencies on other packages and software. Unless you are an expert software developer or one who knows what you are doing with your computer and software, you are likely to get stuck.

There is no easy solution particularly for those who work with Linux or Mac computers, so you will have to search for hours if not days to find the correct solution. If someone has written a solution in Stack Overflow or Quora or indeed in R’s or Rstudio’s forums, then often you have no easy way out. If not, you may have to abandon the analyses. It has happened to me several times.

Fortunately, R’s developers have provided a solution and if you use this solution, life becomes easier. This is a package by the name of ‘pak’, and within pak package, there is function pkg_sysreqs() which takes the following three parameters:

• What package you want to install (name of the package)
• Whether you want to know of its dependencies (of course yes, so the value is set to be TRUE, note the capital letter T)
• What operating system you work with

The documentation for pkg_sysreqs is in help(pkg_sysreqs) once you install pak package, but installation of that package itself is…