Hi Folks, I'm sure I'm speaking for more than a few (though possibly a minority) here.
There's something of a hidden assumption that R users can readily download whatever they need from CRAN. Some of us are on narrow bandwidth dialup connections, so downloading large quantities of stuff is out of the question (e.g. at approx. 5min/MB, it would take over 2 days to download a single CD). The meat of CRAN (including contributed packages and documentation) is enough to fill 5 CDs, though one individual probably wouldn't be interested in all of that. (And, before anyone asks, no I won't be seeing broadband in the foreseeable future!) I've worked round this in various ways in the past. Some Linux distributions (e.g. RedHat, SuSE) come with the basics of R on their CDs, so when I've upgraded Linux I've got a new R (though not the latest). Linux Emporium once obligingly did me a custom CD very cheaply with the contributed packages. A friend with high-bandwidth access did me the 5 CDs in return for a pub lunch. And so on. One can get round it by bothering someone. What I'd like to suggest, for consideration, is that along with the stirling work done at many centres to set up and maintain mirrors of CRAN, some might consider offering also the service of burning CDs on request, for a reasonable charge. The difficulty, of course, is that it's going to take someone's time om something which may well not be their proper business. (I'm prompted to think about this again by the emergence of R-2 -> 2.0.1 -> one day soon? -> 2.1. This is clearly a major advance in R and changes several things, so I'm looking at a major download operation, if not by me then by somebody that I can get CDs from, if I'm to be sure of being up to date on everything I'd like to have. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.) I'd be interested in people's comments on this proposal. Best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 [NB: New number!] Date: 16-Nov-04 Time: 21:39:14 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------ ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html