[Rd] Unexpected source() behavior in R-devel

[Sean Davis]

Seth Falcon wrote:
> Peter Dalgaard <p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk> writes:
>
>   
>> "Henrik Bengtsson" <hb at stat.berkeley.edu> writes:
>>
>>     
>>> This has been reported before on r-devel, e.g. May 9, 2006 "[Rd] Seg
>>> fault when installing package from bad repository".
>>>
>>> It's happening on Mac OSX when trying to download non-existing
>>> webpages (HTTP status 404). That's all I know (not using OSX myself).
>>>       
>> It is not entirely obvious that it is the same problem, but it might be.
>>
>> This happened to me on Linux (2.3.1 on FC5), but it has only happened
>> that one time. I don't think I did anything particularly strange
>> earlier in that session.
>>
>> Of course, with 20/20 hindsight, I should have taken the core dump
>> option...
>>     
>
> I'm pretty sure this is the same issue and one that has been fixed in
> R-devel.
>
>     r38716 | ripley | 2006-07-30 00:19:35 -0700 (Sun, 30 Jul 2006) | 1 line
>     Changed paths:
>        M /trunk/src/modules/internet/internet.c
>     
>     crash workaround from Seth Falcon
>
>
> Sean: can you try just download.file with a URL that gives 404?  Are
> you running an R version prior to the above commit?
>   
Seth,

As Peter pointed out, this looks like a simple server-side issue.  Here 
is the sessionInfo() from my original post.  And below is the output of 
two versions of download.file.

> sessionInfo()
R version 2.4.0 Under development (unstable) (2006-09-02 r39068) 

 > download.file('http://bioconductor.org/getBioC.R',destfile='/tmp/junk.R')
trying URL 'http://bioconductor.org/getBioC.R'
Error in download.file("http://bioconductor.org/getBioC.R", destfile = 
"/tmp/junk.R") :
        cannot open URL 'http://bioconductor.org/getBioC.R'
In addition: Warning message:
cannot open: HTTP status was '404 Not Found'
 > 
download.file('http://www.bioconductor.org/getBioC.R',destfile='/tmp/junk.R')
trying URL 'http://www.bioconductor.org/getBioC.R'
Content type 'text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1' length 1345 bytes
opened URL
==================================================
downloaded 1345 bytes