[Rd] Strategy for downloading packages

[Duncan Murdoch]

I have a client who wants to install R and a custom package on a machine 
with no internet connection, so he wants to put everything needed on a 
CDROM and install from there.

I've told him how to work out what is needed, but it seems that too much 
manual work is needed:  he needs to install the packages from .zip files 
(this is Windows) in the right order so dependencies are met, etc.

Is there an automated tool to do this?  That is:

  - start from an R installation that's working, and then follow the 
dependency tree from a specified list of packages to generate a list of 
packages to download
  - download all the .zip or .tar.gz files for those from CRAN (possibly 
listing the ones that don't exist there, because they are local custom ones)
  - produce a script that can be run to install all of them on a new R 
install.

Duncan Murdoch