[Rd] Re: [R] case-insensitive ZIP

[Primer, Jeremy (FID)]

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. 

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:ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk] 
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.]

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595 
--------------------------------------------------------
 
This is not an offer (or solicitation of an offer) to buy/se...{{dropped}}