I am trying to use biomaRt with an archive version of Ensembl for reproducibility, since the project I am working on has specified a specific version of Ensembl (version 98). However, I am running into an error in getBM that doesn't occur with the main Ensembl mart. Here is some example code to reproduce the error. I've used Ensembl version 100, which is the current version of Ensembl, to demonstrate that the error doesn't seem to have anything to do with the query or the data that it returns, since both getBM calls in this example should return exactly the same thing. Substituting any other number with 100 produces the same result.

library(biomaRt)
mart_good <- useMart(biomart="ENSEMBL_MART_ENSEMBL", host="ensembl.org", dataset="hsapiens_gene_ensembl")
mart_bad <- useMart(biomart="ENSEMBL_MART_ENSEMBL", host="e100.ensembl.org", dataset="hsapiens_gene_ensembl")
# This works
getBM(attributes = "ensembl_gene_id", mart = mart_good,
      filters = "ensembl_gene_id", values = "ENSG00000000003")
# This fails
getBM(attributes = "ensembl_gene_id", mart = mart_bad,
      filters = "ensembl_gene_id", values = "ENSG00000000003")

When I run this code, the last line produces:

> getBM(attributes = "ensembl_gene_id", mart = mart_bad,
+       filters = "ensembl_gene_id", values = "ENSG00000000003")
NULL
Error in .processResults(postRes, mart = mart, sep = sep, fullXmlQuery = fullXmlQuery,  : 
  The query to the BioMart webservice returned an invalid result.
The number of columns in the result table does not equal the number of attributes in the query.
Please report this on the support site at http://support.bioconductor.org

Can anyone tell me whether this is an issue with the package, or if I'm doing something wrong?

Session info:

> sessionInfo()
R version 4.0.0 (2020-04-24)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Matrix products: default
BLAS:   /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/blas/libblas.so.3.9.0
LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lapack/liblapack.so.3.9.0

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C               LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8     LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8   
 [6] LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8    LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                  LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       

attached base packages:
[1] grDevices datasets  parallel  graphics  stats4    stats     utils     methods   base     

other attached packages:
 [1] biomaRt_2.44.0              assertthat_0.2.1            DESeq2_1.28.1               SummarizedExperiment_1.18.1 DelayedArray_0.14.0        
 [6] matrixStats_0.56.0          Biobase_2.48.0              fs_1.4.1                    tximport_1.16.0             here_0.1                   
[11] readr_1.3.1                 conflicted_1.0.4            tidyr_1.1.0                 devtools_2.3.0              usethis_1.6.1              
[16] openxlsx_4.1.5              magrittr_1.5                dplyr_0.8.5                 foreach_1.5.1               plyr_1.8.6                 
[21] glue_1.4.1                  stringr_1.4.0               GenomicRanges_1.40.0        GenomeInfoDb_1.24.0         IRanges_2.22.1             
[26] ggplot2_3.3.0               S4Vectors_0.26.1            BiocGenerics_0.34.0        

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] bitops_1.0-6           bit64_0.9-8            httr_1.4.1             progress_1.2.2         RColorBrewer_1.1-2     rprojroot_1.3-2       
 [7] tools_4.0.0            backports_1.1.7        R6_2.4.1               DBI_1.1.0              colorspace_1.4-2       withr_2.2.0           
[13] tidyselect_1.1.0       prettyunits_1.1.1      processx_3.4.2         curl_4.3               bit_1.1-15.2           compiler_4.0.0        
[19] cli_2.0.2              desc_1.2.0             scales_1.1.1           genefilter_1.70.0      askpass_1.1            callr_3.4.3           
[25] rappdirs_0.3.1         digest_0.6.25          rmarkdown_2.1          XVector_0.28.0         base64enc_0.1-3        htmltools_0.4.0       
[31] pkgconfig_2.0.3        sessioninfo_1.1.1      dbplyr_1.4.3           rlang_0.4.6            rstudioapi_0.11        RSQLite_2.2.0         
[37] jsonlite_1.6.1         BiocParallel_1.22.0    zip_2.0.4              RCurl_1.98-1.2         GenomeInfoDbData_1.2.3 Matrix_1.3-0          
[43] Rcpp_1.0.4.6           munsell_0.5.0          fansi_0.4.1            lifecycle_0.2.0        stringi_1.4.6          yaml_2.2.1            
[49] zlibbioc_1.34.0        BiocFileCache_1.12.0   pkgbuild_1.0.8         grid_4.0.0             blob_1.2.1             crayon_1.3.4          
[55] lattice_0.20-41        splines_4.0.0          annotate_1.66.0        hms_0.5.3              locfit_1.5-9.4         knitr_1.28            
[61] ps_1.3.3               pillar_1.4.4           geneplotter_1.66.0     codetools_0.2-16       pkgload_1.0.2          XML_3.99-0.3          
[67] evaluate_0.14          remotes_2.1.1          vctrs_0.3.0            testthat_2.3.2         openssl_1.4.1          gtable_0.3.0          
[73] purrr_0.3.4            xfun_0.14              xtable_1.8-5           survival_3.1-12        tibble_3.0.1           iterators_1.0.12      
[79] AnnotationDbi_1.50.0   memoise_1.1.0          ellipsis_0.3.1    

I don't think that's how you specify an archived Biomart.

>  mart <- useMart("ensembl","hsapiens_gene_ensembl", host ="http://sep2019.archive.ensembl.org")
> getBM(attributes = "ensembl_gene_id", mart = mart,
      filters = "ensembl_gene_id", values = "ENSG00000000003")
  ensembl_gene_id
1 ENSG00000000003