On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 11:28 AM, Erik Bray <erik.m.b...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 11:24 AM, Jeroen Demeyer <jdeme...@cage.ugent.be> > wrote: >> On 2017-10-19 17:21, Emmanuel Charpentier wrote: >>> >>> I do not think that a >>> non-communicating R is useful in Sage. >> >> >> A non-communicating R in Sage can be very useful if you are not using R in >> Sage at all (which is very likely the vast majority of Sage users). > > Or, as you and I have both pointed out, you *are* using R but would > prefer to use a different download method than the one built into R > (which may still use HTTPS, especially if it's necessary to access > CRAN at all, but that doesn't mean R has to be the one doing the > downloading).
Doing a little more research on this*, it seems that R can in fact perfectly well install packages from compressed tarballs, etc. (through the UI, importantly). For downloading files it actually supports multiple download methods, one of which is to use libcurl (which can be built without HTTPS support; I've done so myself). But it also has a built-in "internal" method which may be part of the problem. If that can't be built without SSL support then that needs to be fixed. Finally, it also supports pointing to alternative package repositories which may or may not use HTTPS. Naturally, for the "average" user we *do* want to support transparent package installation from CRAN with HTTPS support which is why the OpenSSL issue needs to be resolved. But assuming that R *can* be built without SSL, and can work without SSL, that is acceptable too especially for users who know what they're doing and don't need the SSL support. I suggest that this be allowed to proceed, just with a loud warning (as Thierry suggested). I'll have a look at your patch to see what it's doing and if such a patch really needs to be maintained or not... * https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/utils/versions/3.4.1/topics/INSTALL https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/utils/versions/3.4.1/topics/install.packages https://www.rdocumentation.org/link/download.file?package=utils&version=3.4.1 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
