[Rd] url, readLines, source behind a proxy

[Henrik Bengtsson]

Looking at the source code (src/library/tools/R/check.R and
src/library/tools/R/QC.R), I found that...

WORKAROUND:
You can trick 'R CMD check' to quickly skip the
"check_package_CRAN_incoming" test by providing it with invalid URLs
to repositories by setting system environment
'_R_CHECK_XREFS_REPOSITORIES_' to a non-empty URL. For example:

% export _R_CHECK_XREFS_REPOSITORIES_="invalidURL"
% R CMD check --as-cran ...

gives:

* checking CRAN incoming feasibility ...NB: need Internet access to
use CRAN incoming checks
 OK

/Henrik

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 5:46 AM, Renaud Gaujoux
<renaud at mancala.cbio.uct.ac.za> wrote:
>
> 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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>>>
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>>
>>
>>
>
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