Primer, Jeremy (FID) wrote:
Uwe and Brian,
Thanks for your attention to this one.
We currently have the following array of atypical situations in our corporate installation:
(1) Central install directory, where I neither have nor can reasonably want Administrator priviledges; (2) IT staff willing to maintain R officially but wants to leave *contributed* packages to user groups if at all possible; (3) Direct access from R to the CRAN not working through any of the methods owing to the proxy server.
So I downloaded some 40 contributed package *.ZIP files directly from
CRAN using Internet Explorer, then ran install.packages() in R on these
local zipfiles with parameter CRAN=NULL. Except for the case-sensitivity
of the "*.zip" extension in install.packages(), which I amended myself,
this appears to have worked fine, passed checksums, etc. Since I
installed the packages with install.packages() and they passed checksum,
I don't see why they would not work. Some simple tests worked, and
setting libPaths() and running installed.packages() suggests that R
knows what it has.
No, I mean that some self zipped .ZIP files won't work generally. Those on CRAN are build with R CMD INSTALL --build, and they do have the extension .zip rather than .ZIP.
So it looks like your web browser does strange things with the extension.
Uwe Ligges
I can continue on fine as is, so the remaining question is whether install.packages() should be amended for other users. I felt it did not fulfill its contract in a basic way. However, I did enjoy learning about R debug facilities, something I'll need to know ....
Regards,
Jeremy Primer
-----Original Message-----
From: Prof Brian Ripley [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 2004 3:45 AM
To: Uwe Ligges
Cc: Primer, Jeremy (FID); R-devel
Subject: Re: [Rd] Re: [R] case-insensitive ZIP
On Tue, 2 Nov 2004, Uwe Ligges wrote:
Primer, Jeremy (FID) wrote:
A development note:
In the function "install.packages", it would be helpful to those of us who have atypical installations and install manually from ZIP files to
Perhaps you could tell us why you do this? Where do you get `contributed zipfiles' that are actually `ZIPfiles', especially as CRAN has .zip files you could get instead? Or is the problem in the way you get them?
have
pkgnames <- sub("\\.zip$", "", pkgnames)
replaced with
pkgnames <- sub("\\.zip$", "", pkgnames, ignore.case = TRUE)
because the contributed zipfiles are ZIPfiles. The routine did not work for me out of the box.
[moved to R-devel]
Hmmm. Recent versions of R require correctly installed versions (using
R CMD INSTALL) of the packages. It is hard work to get a file called *.ZIP (rather than *.zip) that contains a valid binary package for
Windows.
I'd vote against such a change, since the recent behaviour suggests perfectly well that the file probably won't work.
Nothing stops people with `atypical installations' amending functions to suit their atypicality, but it is usually better to fix your local problems that expect your tools to workaround them.
[Analogously, R CMD INSTALL will not install .tgz files on Unix, even though some people distribute them: they are (equally) not a supported format.]
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