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

[Uwe Ligges]

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 at 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.]
>