[Rd] url, readLines, source behind a proxy

[Renaud Gaujoux]

On 23/04/2012 17:39, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> On 18/04/2012 16:04, Joshua Ulrich wrote:
>> Hi Renaud,
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 12:22 AM, Renaud Gaujoux
>> <renaud at mancala.cbio.uct.ac.za>  wrote:
>>> Hi Henrik,
>>>
>> <snip>
>>>
>>> Could anybody behind a proxy check if the issue can be reproduced?
>>> My proxy is in fact provided by cntml, which acts as a local proxy that
>>> takes care of tricky authentication protocols with the actual 
>>> university
>>> proxy, not natively supported by my system (Ubuntu). Anybody in this 
>>> case?
>>>
>> I can replicate this on a WinXP system, where I normally have to use
>> the --internet2 flag to get internet access through a proxy.
>>
>> ?download.file has a section on "Setting Proxies", which describes how
>> to use environment variables to set proxy information.  Setting
>> http_proxy='http://my.proxy.com/' was enough for me to get R CMD
>> check to run successfully with the --as-cran flag.
>
> I guess that the simplest way on Windows is to ensure that --internet2 
> is set.  In R-patched there is a new environment variable 
> R_WIN_INTERNET2 which lets you do that (set it in ~/.R/check.Renviron).
>
> [Setting proxies is so 20th century -- even moderately competent 
> sysadmins worked out how to use transparent caching proxies ca 1995. 
> Which is why the R developers give it a low priority.]
I completely understand the low priority -- fast-illimited-internet 
based --  point of view. I wish I could live without such a fussy proxy, 
but I have not much choice.
I like to understand why things work and do not work though.
Is there any special feature my proxy should have to allow 
readLines/source to correctly read remote data? What makes its access 
different from wget?

Thank you for your insights on this.

>
>
>>
>>> Thanks.
>>> Renaud
>>>
>>
>> Best,
>> -- 
>> Joshua Ulrich  |  FOSS Trading: www.fosstrading.com
>>
>> R/Finance 2012: Applied Finance with R
>> www.RinFinance.com
>>
>>
>>> On Tue, 17 Apr 2012, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 1:01 AM, Renaud Gaujoux
>>>> <renaud at mancala.cbio.uct.ac.za>  wrote:
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> when I run R CMD check with flag --as-cran, the process hangs at 
>>>>> stage:
>>>>>
>>>>> * checking CRAN incoming feasibility ...
>>>>
>>>> Doesn't it time-out eventually?  I'm not behind a proxy but when I've
>>>> been running 'R CMD check' whenon very poor 3G connection, it had
>>>> eventually timed out.
>>>>
>>>> /Henrik
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I am pretty sure it is a proxy issue.
>>>>> I looked at the check code in the tools package and it seems that 
>>>>> the issue
>>>>> is in the local function `.repository_db()` (defined in
>>>>> `tools:::.check_package_CRAN_incoming()`), which eventually calls 
>>>>> `url()`
>>>>> with argument open="rb", that hangs probably because it does not 
>>>>> use the
>>>>> proxy settings.
>>>>> I had a similar issue with `source()`, which apparently uses internal
>>>>> network functions (not as download.file), but is supposed to work 
>>>>> behind a
>>>>> proxy (correct?).
>>>>> Does anybody else have this problem?
>>>>>
>>>>> I was wondering if there is a way around, as I would like to be 
>>>>> able to use
>>>>> --as-cran for my checks.
>>>>> Thank you.
>>>>>
>>>>> Renaud
>>>>>
>>>>> -- 
>>>>> Renaud Gaujoux
>>>>> Computational Biology - University of Cape Town
>>>>> South Africa
>>>>>
>>>>> ______________________________________________
>>>>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>>>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>>>
>>>
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>
>