[Rd] Pb with contrib.url() (PR#9131)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Mon, 7 Aug 2006, Simon Urbanek wrote:

> Herve,
> 
> On Aug 7, 2006, at 11:34 AM, hpages at fhcrc.org wrote:
> 
> > Recently I needed to download a few R packages for Unix, Windows  
> > and Mac OS X. The idea was to put them all together on a USB key in  
> > order to be able to install them on systems without network  
> > connection.
> >
> > It worked fine for the "src" and "win.binary" packages but I had  
> > the following problems with the "mac.binary" packages:
> >
> >> download.packages("XML", destdir=".", type="mac.binary")
> >     Warning: unable to access index for repository
> >     http://cran.fhcrc.org/bin/macosx/x86_64/contrib/2.3
> 
> ^^ we don't build binaries for x86_64 architecture, so you cannot use  
> that (Apple didn't release Leopard yet, so there is no 64-bit Intel  
> binaries around anyway). The only architectures supported by our  
> binaries are powerpc, i686 and universal.

Note that ?download.packages says (from Linux)

    type: character, indicating the type of package to download and
          install. Possible values are '"source"' (the default except
          under the CRAN Mac OS X build), '"mac.binary"' and
          '"win.binary"' (which can be downloaded but not installed).

so we do appear to say we can download MacOS binaries on non-MacOS 
platforms.  There in lies the problem as contrib.url(type="mac.binary") 
uses the architecture of the current platform.  I think you need types 
"mac.binary.powerpc" etc to now allow this.

-- 
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