CRAN installation of needs in R 3.3.3 fails

[gka]

> install.packages('needs')
Installing package into ‘/home/gka/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.3’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
trying URL 'https://cran.biotools.fr/src/contrib/needs_0.0.3.tar.gz'
Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 5472 bytes
==================================================
downloaded 5472 bytes

Error in library(needs) : there is no package called ‘needs’
Execution halted

The downloaded source packages are in
	‘/tmp/RtmpBegzff/downloaded_packages’
Warning message:
In install.packages("needs") :
  installation of package ‘needs’ had non-zero exit status

[gka]

should mention this happened right after I upgraded R from 3.2.5 to 3.3.3.

Also, R was pretty much broken since some startup script tried to run library(needs) every time I tried to install a package. And since there was no needs package the attempt to install anything failed.

But I eventually found out that I can circumvent this by starting R with --vanilla flag. Then I was able to install devtools and then re-install needs using install_github('joshkatz/needs')