[Bioc-devel] HTTP GET and POST with RCurl | RMySQL

[Martin Morgan]

Seth Falcon <sfalcon at fhcrc.org> writes:
> On 23 Jan 2006, steffen.durinck at esat.kuleuven.be wrote:
>> - Do users find RCurl hard to install and is it easier to install
>>   than RMySQL on all platforms.
>
> In general, I think the answer is yes.  As long as an appropriate
> version of the RCurl binary package has been made available (by
> Omegahat) then installation is entirely trivial on Windows.  On
> unix-like systems, libcurl is commonly available.
>
>> - Will a package that depends on RCurl be build on the bioconductor 
>> repository for all platforms? (With RMySQL my package is not being
>> build on Windows as RMySQL is not installed)
>
> Yes, although as you can see, we seem not to have a binary version of
> RCurl available for R-devel.  We will fix this.  Note that for us,
> keeping RCurl going on Windows is *much* easier than keeping RMySQL
> going.

An update on this. RCurl _is_ available for R-devel, in the 1.8
repository. There is a build system issue so that packages depending
on RCurl were not being built. This should be fixed, with the next
build.

For security reasons, the Windows binary RCurl on Bioconductor does
not have SSL support. This will not be a problem, provided your
use does not require secure access.

For SSL, RCurl has to be built 'by hand'. This can be quite involved
on any platform, and especially on Windows; most users don't want to
do this, but if you're eager the general steps are

0. (hard -- has to be exactly right) Have the R source and tools
   required for building R from source available and working, as
   described in

     http://cran.fhcrc.org/doc/manuals/R-admin.html

1. (easier -- on Windows mingw needs to be used, but not mingw-make)
   If SSL-enabled libcurl not already available, download and build
   openssl from

     http://www.openssl.org/source/.

   (easier -- Windows users should look for the mingw32 target in the
   Makefile, and set ZLIB_PATH (to files in the R source distibution)
   and OPENSSL_PATH) Download and build the libcurl library from
   source, from

     http://curl.haxx.se/download.html

2. (easy) Download & unpack the source package for RCurl from, e.g.,

     http://www.omegahat.org/RCurl/RCurl_0.6-0.tar.gz

3. (easy) Make a binary version of RCurl, moving a copy of the
   libcurl.dll you created in step 1 into the RCurl source
   directory. Something like

     mkdir RCurl/inst/libs
     cp CURL_HOME/libs/libcurl.ddl RCurl/inst/libs
     R CMD build RCurl
     R CMD INSTALL --build RCurl_0.6-0.tar.gz

   You might need to specify the location ofthe libcurl 'header' files
   in R CMD build.

4. (easy) Install the binary version, e.g., using the Packages -->
   Install packages from local zip files menu item. Alternatively
   install RCurl from the command line without building a binary

     R CMD INSTALL RCurl