[R] Rinst.exe question

[Prof Brian Ripley]

> Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2000 08:04:46 -0500
> From: "Liaw, Andy" <andy_liaw at merck.com>
> 
> I think I know why Rwinst.exe doesn't list all packages on my machine.  It
> must have kept a list of known package names internally and check for file
> names that match those package names.

Nope, it looks for *.zip in the directory. It does not look for *.ZIP.

> For whatever reason, when I down loaded the packages via my Netscape
> browser, most (but not all) file names have their first letter capitalized.
> Thus "gss.zip" becomes "Gss.zip", for example.  And it's files like these
> that are not listed by Rwinst.exe.

Yes, that's because they are being saved under their 8.3 MS-DOS name,
so the real name is GSS.ZIP, and Explorer is lying to you.

> Since I downloaded all packages the same way at the same time, I have no
> idea why the file names got converted, or why it only happened to some but
> not all files.

It only happens to those whose lowercased 8.3 name is the same as the
actual name.  That is, the original name is all lower case, less than
8+3 chars.

> Somewhat related: Has anyone noticed? Win98/NT has this very annoying
> "feature" of ignoring cases users typed for a file name.  In Windows
> Explorer, if I ask for a new folder and type "TEMP", it becomes "Temp".
> However, if I type "temp", it stays "temp".  I wonder if my problem with
> Rwinst.exe is somehow related to this.

Well, there are two related problems. Explorer likes to display the
name as Temp, but it is really TEMP.  (That can be turned off, at least
on some versions of Windows. I have it turned off.)  However NT has a
habit of actually re-mapping names, as you saw with netscape.

I can alter rwinst (which really is rwinst, not Rwinst or Rinst)
to look for *.ZIP too, but not before the release of rw1000 tomorrow. 

By the way, the preferred way to install packages is with install.packages(),
which you can use either with a local zip (or even ZIP) file or from
a CRAN repository (well, from tomorrow as the index there is currently
wrong).

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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