R help - Oct 2015 - Installing R 3.2.2 on machine with old libcurl

We have to install R 3.2.2 on machines with too old libcurl to be able
to use https when installing packages, etc.

When a user tries to use install.packages() (with the default value of
the "repos" option), she is presented with a list of https-repos,
which
is not very useful.  She also gets an error message

Error in download.file(url, destfile = f, quiet = TRUE) : 
  unsupported URL scheme

We have put

local({
    options(useHTTPS = FALSE)
})

into the Rprofile.site file, and after that, the user gets a list of
http repos, so she will be able to install packages.  But the error
message is still displayed, which can be confusing.  Is there a way
around this problem?

Also, perhaps the useHTTPS option should default to FALSE if the libcurl
capability is FALSE?


-- 
Regards,
Bj?rn-Helge Mevik