[Rd] Unexpected behaviour with download.packages on Windows

Hong Ooi hongooi at microsoft.com
Fri Sep 29 17:00:08 CEST 2017


If no 'type' is specified, download.packages("pkgname") will download source packages (.tar.gz files), even on Windows. However, the help says


  type   character string, indicate which type of packages: see install.packages.


and on Windows, install.packages defaults to downloading binary packages.

Is this intended behaviour on the part of download.packages? This is on R 3.3.3 and 3.4.1; I haven't tested on 3.4.2 but there's no indication the function has changed.



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