[Rd] Strategy for downloading packages

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 19 Nov 2008, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

> I have a client who wants to install R and a custom package on a machine with 
> no internet connection, so he wants to put everything needed on a CDROM and 
> install from there.
>
> I've told him how to work out what is needed, but it seems that too much 
> manual work is needed:  he needs to install the packages from .zip files 
> (this is Windows) in the right order so dependencies are met, etc.

I don't think the install order matters for binary packages (on Windows or 
elsewhere).  install.packages() certainly does not optimize it.

> Is there an automated tool to do this?  That is:

The easiest way is to copy a repository to the CD-ROM, and point repos at 
that (as a file::// URL).  You can even add files and rebuild the PACKAGES 
file (using tools::write_PACKAGES).

But if the list of packages never changes, why not just install them in a 
separate library and burn that on the CD-ROM?

> - start from an R installation that's working, and then follow the 
> dependency tree from a specified list of packages to generate a list of 
> packages to download
> - download all the .zip or .tar.gz files for those from CRAN (possibly 
> listing the ones that don't exist there, because they are local custom ones)
> - produce a script that can be run to install all of them on a new R 
> install.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
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-- 
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