Uwe and Brian, Thanks for your attention to this one. We currently have the following array of atypical situations in our corporate installation: (1) Central install directory, where I neither have nor can reasonably want Administrator priviledges; (2) IT staff willing to maintain R officially but wants to leave *contributed* packages to user groups if at all possible; (3) Direct access from R to the CRAN not working through any of the methods owing to the proxy server. So I downloaded some 40 contributed package *.ZIP files directly from CRAN using Internet Explorer, then ran install.packages() in R on these local zipfiles with parameter CRAN=NULL. Except for the case-sensitivity of the "*.zip" extension in install.packages(), which I amended myself, this appears to have worked fine, passed checksums, etc. Since I installed the packages with install.packages() and they passed checksum, I don't see why they would not work. Some simple tests worked, and setting libPaths() and running installed.packages() suggests that R knows what it has. I can continue on fine as is, so the remaining question is whether install.packages() should be amended for other users. I felt it did not fulfill its contract in a basic way. However, I did enjoy learning about R debug facilities, something I'll need to know .... Regards, Jeremy Primer -----Original Message----- From: Prof Brian Ripley [mailto:ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk] Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 2004 3:45 AM To: Uwe Ligges Cc: Primer, Jeremy (FID); R-devel Subject: Re: [Rd] Re: [R] case-insensitive ZIP On Tue, 2 Nov 2004, Uwe Ligges wrote:> Primer, Jeremy (FID) wrote: > > > A development note: > > > > In the function "install.packages", it would be helpful to those of > > us who have atypical installations and install manually from ZIP > > files toPerhaps you could tell us why you do this? Where do you get `contributed zipfiles' that are actually `ZIPfiles', especially as CRAN has .zip files you could get instead? Or is the problem in the way you get them?> > have > > > > pkgnames <- sub("\\.zip$", "", pkgnames) > > > > replaced with > > > > pkgnames <- sub("\\.zip$", "", pkgnames, ignore.case = TRUE) > > > > because the contributed zipfiles are ZIPfiles. The routine did not > > work for me out of the box. > > [moved to R-devel] > > Hmmm. Recent versions of R require correctly installed versions (using> R CMD INSTALL) of the packages. It is hard work to get a file called > *.ZIP (rather than *.zip) that contains a valid binary package forWindows.> I'd vote against such a change, since the recent behaviour suggests > perfectly well that the file probably won't work.Nothing stops people with `atypical installations' amending functions to suit their atypicality, but it is usually better to fix your local problems that expect your tools to workaround them. [Analogously, R CMD INSTALL will not install .tgz files on Unix, even though some people distribute them: they are (equally) not a supported format.] -- Brian D. Ripley, ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 -------------------------------------------------------- This is not an offer (or solicitation of an offer) to buy/se...{{dropped}}
Primer, Jeremy (FID) wrote:> Uwe and Brian, > > Thanks for your attention to this one. > > We currently have the following array of atypical situations in our > corporate installation: > > (1) Central install directory, where I neither have nor can reasonably > want Administrator priviledges; > (2) IT staff willing to maintain R officially but wants to leave > *contributed* packages to user groups if at all possible; > (3) Direct access from R to the CRAN not working through any of the > methods owing to the proxy server. > > So I downloaded some 40 contributed package *.ZIP files directly from > CRAN using Internet Explorer, then ran install.packages() in R on these > local zipfiles with parameter CRAN=NULL. Except for the case-sensitivity > of the "*.zip" extension in install.packages(), which I amended myself, > this appears to have worked fine, passed checksums, etc. Since I > installed the packages with install.packages() and they passed checksum, > I don't see why they would not work. Some simple tests worked, and > setting libPaths() and running installed.packages() suggests that R > knows what it has.No, I mean that some self zipped .ZIP files won't work generally. Those on CRAN are build with R CMD INSTALL --build, and they do have the extension .zip rather than .ZIP. So it looks like your web browser does strange things with the extension. Uwe Ligges> I can continue on fine as is, so the remaining question is whether > install.packages() should be amended for other users. I felt it did not > fulfill its contract in a basic way. However, I did enjoy learning about > R debug facilities, something I'll need to know .... > > Regards, > Jeremy Primer > > -----Original Message----- > From: Prof Brian Ripley [mailto:ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk] > Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 2004 3:45 AM > To: Uwe Ligges > Cc: Primer, Jeremy (FID); R-devel > Subject: Re: [Rd] Re: [R] case-insensitive ZIP > > On Tue, 2 Nov 2004, Uwe Ligges wrote: > > >>Primer, Jeremy (FID) wrote: >> >> >>>A development note: >>> >>>In the function "install.packages", it would be helpful to those of >>>us who have atypical installations and install manually from ZIP >>>files to > > > Perhaps you could tell us why you do this? Where do you get > `contributed zipfiles' that are actually `ZIPfiles', especially as CRAN > has .zip files you could get instead? Or is the problem in the way you > get them? > > >>>have >>> >>> pkgnames <- sub("\\.zip$", "", pkgnames) >>> >>>replaced with >>> >>> pkgnames <- sub("\\.zip$", "", pkgnames, ignore.case = TRUE) >>> >>>because the contributed zipfiles are ZIPfiles. The routine did not >>>work for me out of the box. >> >>[moved to R-devel] >> >>Hmmm. Recent versions of R require correctly installed versions (using > > >>R CMD INSTALL) of the packages. It is hard work to get a file called >>*.ZIP (rather than *.zip) that contains a valid binary package for > > Windows. > >>I'd vote against such a change, since the recent behaviour suggests >>perfectly well that the file probably won't work. > > > Nothing stops people with `atypical installations' amending functions to > suit their atypicality, but it is usually better to fix your local > problems that expect your tools to workaround them. > > [Analogously, R CMD INSTALL will not install .tgz files on Unix, even > though some people distribute them: they are (equally) not a supported > format.] >