In the past Bioconductor provided an install script that was sourced directly from the Bioconductor.org website to install Bioconductor packages. We have since moved away from this practice in favor of BiocManager since sourcing in this way is a known security risk. The scripts have remained on the website for legacy and reproduce ability. To increase security, we will be moving these scripts to a github repository https://github.com/Bioconductor/LegacyInstall . They will remain available to use for the appropriate legacy versions of Bioconductor (<=3.5).
There is also an inconsistent data directory for accessing annotation and experiment packages. We will be removing this directory https://bioconductor.org/packages/data
in favor of the standard retrieval locations.
The process might be more involved to get packages for older R/Bioc but all packages are available, and we will assist in anyway if there are any questions, concerns, or issues with retrieval.
We will begin this process in June.