[Rd] Unexpected behaviour with download.packages on Windows

[Rui Barradas]

Hello,

The help pages for download.packages and install.packages say
'type = getOption("pkgType")'.
And on Windows I get

getOption("pkgType")
[1] "both"

which means in ?getOptions

pkgType:

     The default type of packages to be downloaded and installed – see 
install.packages. Possible values are "win.binary", "source" and "both" 
(the default).

Are you sure the package you're downloading has a binary version or is 
it source only?

sessionInfo()
R version 3.4.1 (2017-06-30)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 7 x64 (build 7601) Service Pack 1

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=Portuguese_Portugal.1252 
LC_CTYPE=Portuguese_Portugal.1252
[3] LC_MONETARY=Portuguese_Portugal.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C 

[5] LC_TIME=Portuguese_Portugal.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

other attached packages:
  [1] Hmisc_4.0-3          Formula_1.2-2        survival_2.41-3
  [4] lattice_0.20-35      DescTools_0.99.22    RecordLinkage_0.4-10
  [7] ffbase_0.12.3        ff_2.2-13            bit_1.1-12
[10] RSQLite_2.0          DBI_0.7              tcR_2.2.1.11
[13] igraph_1.1.2         reshape2_1.4.2       gridExtra_2.2.1
[16] dplyr_0.7.1          ggplot2_2.2.1        sos_2.0-0
[19] brew_1.0-6

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
  [1] Rcpp_0.12.11        stringdist_0.9.4.6  mvtnorm_1.0-6
  [4] class_7.3-14        assertthat_0.2.0    digest_0.6.12
  [7] ipred_0.9-6         R6_2.2.2            plyr_1.8.4
[10] backports_1.1.0     acepack_1.4.1       ada_2.0-5
[13] e1071_1.6-8         rlang_0.1.1         lazyeval_0.2.0
[16] data.table_1.10.4   blob_1.1.0          rpart_4.1-11
[19] Matrix_1.2-10       checkmate_1.8.3     splines_3.4.1
[22] stringr_1.2.0       foreign_0.8-69      htmlwidgets_0.9
[25] munsell_0.4.3       compiler_3.4.1      pkgconfig_2.0.1
[28] base64enc_0.1-3     manipulate_1.0.1    htmltools_0.3.6
[31] nnet_7.3-12         evd_2.3-2           htmlTable_1.9
[34] tibble_1.3.3        prodlim_1.6.1       expm_0.999-2
[37] MASS_7.3-47         grid_3.4.1          xtable_1.8-2
[40] gtable_0.2.0        magrittr_1.5        scales_0.4.1
[43] stringi_1.1.5       bindrcpp_0.2        latticeExtra_0.6-28
[46] boot_1.3-19         fastmatch_1.1-0     lava_1.5.1
[49] RColorBrewer_1.1-2  tools_3.4.1         bit64_0.9-7
[52] glue_1.1.1          parallel_3.4.1      colorspace_1.3-2
[55] cluster_2.0.6       memoise_1.1.0       knitr_1.16
[58] bindr_0.1


Hope this helps,

Rui Barradas

Em 29-09-2017 16:00, Hong Ooi via R-devel escreveu:
> If no 'type' is specified, download.packages("pkgname") will download source packages (.tar.gz files), even on Windows. However, the help says
>
>
>    type   character string, indicate which type of packages: see install.packages.
>
>
> and on Windows, install.packages defaults to downloading binary packages.
>
> Is this intended behaviour on the part of download.packages? This is on R 3.3.3 and 3.4.1; I haven't tested on 3.4.2 but there's no indication the function has changed.
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>