[Rd] available.packages (PR#9841)

[ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk]

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The documented specification is file:///d:/CRAN (as specified by RFC1738), 
so this is working correctly.

The CHANGES file for 2.2.0 says:

     o   file:// URLs are now interpreted by download.file(),
         download.packages() and url() in the same way as Mozilla-based
         browsers.  That is, the expected form is

                 file:///d:/path/to/file

         with *three* slashes.

The point is that this is file:// + host + / + path/to/file, and host is 
missing.  That some versions of IE did not follow the standard is part of 
the confusion here.

Note that ?available.packages does say

      If a repository is
      local, i.e., the URL starts with '"file:"', then the packages are
      not downloaded but used directly.  (Both '"file:"' and
      '"file:///"' are allowed as prefixes to a file path, the latter
      for an absolute file path.)

but 'file:' does not work with drives on Windows.  That seems clearly to 
rule out your usage.


On Fri, 10 Aug 2007, zivan.karaman at gmail.com wrote:

> Full_Name: Zivan Karaman
> Version: 2.5.1
> OS: Windows XP SP2
> Submission from: (NULL) (195.6.68.214)
>
>
> I think that I have encountered a bug in the function "available.packages" when
> using a local repository (file://
) on Windows.
>
> Version information:
> platform       i386-pc-mingw32
> arch           i386
> os             mingw32
> system         i386, mingw32
> status
> major          2
> minor          5.1
> year           2007
> month          06
> day            27
> svn rev        42083
> language       R
> version.string R version 2.5.1 (2007-06-27)
>
> I have made a copy of the CRAN "/bin/windows/contrib/2.5" directory in the
> "D:/CRAN" folder on my machine.
>
> When I issue the command:
>
> available.packages(contrib.url("file://D:/CRAN"))
>
> I get the follwoing message:
> Error in gzfile(file, "r") : unable to open connection
> In addition: Warning message:
> cannot open compressed file ':/CRAN/bin/windows/contrib/2.5/PACKAGES' in:
> gzfile(file, "r")
>
> Looking at the source code, I've spotted the following lines which seem to cause
> trouble:
>
>            if (.Platform$OS.type == "windows") {
>                if (length(grep("[A-Za-z]:", tmpf)))
>                  tmpf <- substring(tmpf, 2)
>            }
> Deleting them, the function works OK.
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>

-- 
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
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