[Rd] Strategy for downloading packages

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 11/19/2008 4:16 PM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> 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.

Thanks, as I mentioned to Simon I didn't know this.  That definitely 
makes things simpler.

> 
>> 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?

In the long run, the first order dependencies won't likely change, but 
their dependencies might.  We didn't write those packages, we just use 
them.

Duncan Murdoch


> 
>> - 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
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>
>