[R] RCurl and kerberos

[TAPO (Thomas Agersten Poulsen)]

Dear list,

I would like to call a Kerberos-authenticated web-service from within R.

Curl can do it:
$ curl --negotiate -u : "http://my.web.service/"

so I would expect that RCurl also has the capability, but I have not been able to find the correct options to set.

listCurlOptions() does not return anything with negotiate, and searching the source of RCurl, the only thing I found was 

./RCurl/R/curlInfo.S:names(CurlFeatureBits) = c("ipv6", "kerberos4", "ssl", "libz", "ntlm", "gssnegotiate",

but e.g.
getURL("http://my.web.service",.opts=curlOptions(username=":",httpauth="gssnegotiate"))

does not work.

Does anybody know if RCurl or another package is able to negotiate the GSS api or otherwise access a Kerberos enabled webservice and how?

Testing was done in R 2.12.1 on Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS / Lucid.

Thanks in advance,
Thomas.