[Rd] available.packages function and UNC paths

[m@rk@iee m@iii@g oii hrsdc-rhdcc@gc@c@]

Hello,

I'm responsible for maintaining a mirrored internal CRAN repository for my organization. We have a script that uses the miniCRAN library to add and update packages within the repository and since the repository is stored on a network drive I have to use UNC paths when calling miniCRAN functions such as this:

updatePackages(path = '\\\\my-network-drive.net\\repos\\packages', ...)

updatePackages function in turns call pkgAvail, another miniCRAN function, which calls available.packages and then read.dcf function. However I discovered that this line in available.packages transforms the UNC path to a form that read.dcf can't use:

if (startsWith(repos, "file:///")) {tmpf <- paste0('/', substring(repos, 8L), "/PACKAGES")

This line transforms my UNC path to //\\\\my-network-drive.net\\repos\\packages, which read.dcf can't use. During debugging I found that pkgAvail transformed my UNC path to 'file:///\\\\ my-network-drive.net\\repos\\packages' and that is the path being passed to available.packages. To fix my issue I re-defined my own available.packages function and changed the line to:

if (startsWith(repos, "file:///")) {tmpf <- paste0('/', substring(repos, 10L), "/PACKAGES")

This way the UNC path being passed to read.dcf will be '/\\my-network-drive.net\\repos\\packages', which read.dcf can use. I'm wondering if similar changes can be made in the available.packages function for the next R release to automatically detect UNC paths and modify it so that it can work with UNC paths.

Thanks,

Mark






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