[Rd] Re: [R] case-insensitive ZIP

[Prof Brian Ripley]

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.]

-- 
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