I have a script that I run every night and it checks for a long list of R packages and installs what is needed. On a new SL5 system, I noticed that the script failed because the package "coda" was not available. "There's a mistake" I thought to myself, because coda is one of the heavily used packages for Bayesian MCMC modeling. It turned out that the CRAN current version of coda is set to ONLY compile for R >= 2.5. Since the SL5 version of R is 2.4, the package manager was not able to find the coda package. I updated R on the system to the version that is available in Fedora and then the package script worked fine. I understand the SL5 philosophy of preferring stable things, but since R is one of the "feature packages" that differentiates Scientific Linux from other RedHat EL descendants like CentOS, it seems important to me that you should keep R more up to date than most packages. I went to the SL website to try to enter this opinion, but I find it is necessary to log in and I can't find a place where I can register myself. What's up with that? -- Paul E. Johnson Professor, Political Science 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 University of Kansas