R devel - Sep 2006 - wishlist --- menu entry [Rgui] misc --- stop current computation

This is from R-2.4.0alpha on windows XP, downloaded from CRAN yesterday.

I did
update.packages(destdir= ..., ask=FALSE,checkBuilt=TRUE)

which took quite a long time (as.expected). When the internet cafe
had to close, I had to stop the downloading, but the menu item
misc --- stop current computation only stopped the current download,
and then R imeadiaetely continued whit the next in the waitin list, so I had
to kill
R. I  would be nice if this could be corrected so it really
stopped all the waiting computastion!

Kjetil halvorsen

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On Tue, 19 Sep 2006, Kjetil Halvorsen wrote:
> This is from R-2.4.0alpha on windows XP, downloaded from CRAN yesterday.
>
> I did
> update.packages(destdir= ..., ask=FALSE,checkBuilt=TRUE)
>
> which took quite a long time (as.expected). When the internet cafe
> had to close, I had to stop the downloading, but the menu item
> misc --- stop current computation only stopped the current download,
> and then R imeadiaetely continued whit the next in the waitin list, so I
had
> to kill
> R. I  would be nice if this could be corrected so it really
> stopped all the waiting computastion!
As it does what it says, it cannot be 'corrected' to do something else.
I usually find hitting Ctrl-C (or ESC in Rgui) a few times breaks out 
here.

The issue is that update.packages (or more precisely download.packages) 
has a loop of try() constructs, and those are trapping interrupts.
I don't think there is any way to distinguish those from other internal 
errors.  In any case, it is a somewhat delicate question as to what you 
want: do you want pending on.exit() actions done, for example?

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at 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