On 6/22/07, Prof Brian Ripley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, 22 Jun 2007, hadley wickham wrote: > > > What's the recommended way to check if an internet connection is > > available across platforms? I was using is.null(nsl()) but this does > > not work on windows. > > I don't know a way to do this on Windows without a possible very long > hang. It's complicated by the use of two alternative internet connection > mechanisms on Windows and having little control over the IE-based one. > > Another issue is software firewalls: they can take many minutes to > decide to let a new program talk to the Internet if they 'call home' to > ask advice.
Thanks for those details, I hadn't considered the problems that might be associated with firewalls. To give a little more context, I have an example in one of my packages which downloads some data off the web. I don't really want to include the data in my package, since it's not my data (although I'm fairly certain I could get permission to include it). So really it doesn't matter if there will be a long delay, provided that there won't be a long delay for the windows CRAN server. I could wrap the entire example in dontrun, but then that loses the useful checking I get locally when running r cmd check. Are there any other solutions? Thanks, Hadley ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
