[Rd] Strategy for downloading packages

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 11/19/2008 4:07 PM, Simon Urbanek wrote:
> On Nov 19, 2008, at 15:52 , Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> 
>> 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.
>>
> 
> Why would that be necessary? The order is plays no role, since all  
> it's just unpacking, so you can as well burn the content of the  
> installed library and you're set... Or am I missing something?

Thanks, I didn't realize that the install order doesn't matter.  But in 
the longer term, he'll probably want to do this himself, so he'll still 
need to generate the list of dependencies and download them.  Or maybe 
just burning a copy of the installed library is what he should do --- 
I'd just be worried about versioning issues if he tries to update the 
install without starting from scratch.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> Cheers,
> S
> 
> 
> 
>> 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
>>
>> ______________________________________________
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>>
>>
> 
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