[Rd] RFC install.packages() changes

[Gabor Grothendieck]

Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck <at> myway.com> writes:

: 
: Prof Brian Ripley <ripley <at> stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:
: 
: : install/update.packages() in R-devel has been enhanced in a few ways,
: : notably to handle multiple repositories, and to allow packages to be 
: : reinstalled under the current version of R.
: 
: The change to updating that I would like would be to check before 
: downloading whether the package is open.  Right now using the 
: update menu item in Windows it checks afterwards 
: and if its open fails which means that one has to do the download all
: over again.  If it failed before downloading it would save some
: wasted downloads.

While we are on this topic, when I choose Update from the Windows menu recently
on R 2.0.0 on XP I get the following which I have never seen before.
I am just ignoring these warning messages but am not sure if I should
take notice.

R> update.packages()
trying URL `http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/2.0/PACKAGES'
Content type `text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1' length 22605 bytes
opened URL
downloaded 22Kb

Warning messages: 
1: DESCRIPTION file of package  'file2540'  missing or broken
 in: packageDescription(p, lib = lib, fields = pkgFlds) 
2: number of columns of result
        not a multiple of vector length (arg 2) in: rbind(retval, c(p, lib, 
desc))