[Rd] install.packages no longer respects quiet = TRUE ?

Prof Brian Ripley ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Tue Apr 28 19:20:53 CEST 2015


> On 28 April 2015 at 11:21, Hadley Wickham wrote:
> | > install.packages("plyr", quiet = T)
> |
> | trying URL 'http://cran.rstudio.com/bin/macosx/mavericks/contrib/3.2/plyr_1.8.2.tgz'
> | Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 855795 bytes (835 KB)
> | ==================================================
> | downloaded 835 KB
> |
> |
> | The downloaded binary packages are in
> | /tmp/RtmpOcorLA/downloaded_packages
> |
> |
> | I don't have R 3.1.3 handy, but I'm pretty sure this used to produce no output.

First, the description is

    quiet: logical: if true, reduce the amount of output.

not 'no output'.

This 'change' is seen only for installs of binary packages.  The 
difference is that the default is now type = "both", and 3.1.3 used type 
= 'binary': adding type = "binary" produces what you expected in 3.2.0, 
and type = "both" is already quieter in R-patched.

(Note that it is rather difficult to test install.packages for Mac 
binaries prior to release as that relies on a 'CRAN distribution' which 
pretty much has to be the default version on the machine.)

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford
1 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK



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