[Rd] update.packages with ask = FALSE will sometimes ask about updates

[Richard Cotton]

On 13 February 2015 at 10:11, Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> On 11/02/2015 10:46, Richard Cotton wrote:
>
> The 'at a minimum' information required by the posting guide is conspicuous
> by its absence.
>
> At a guess, this is R-devel and Windows.

What I'm running doesn't matter if I'm asking for general opinion on
the best behaviour.  It has to work for everyone.

> He missed the documented options (and the NEWS items, the posting guide
> ...).

All this is irrelevant.  Whatever my OS, and whatever the documented
options are, if I explicitly say I don't want interactive behaviour by
specifying ask = FALSE, then R stopping to ask me things feels like
incorrect behaviour.

----

Since there seems to be resistance to making any changes to the
behaviour, for future readers, the solution that has been suggested to
me to ensure that you don't get asked any questions is:

Make sure you can compile packages (on Windows this involves
installing Rtools).  Then explicitly set type = "source" when you use
ask = FALSE.

update.packages(ask = FALSE, type = "source")