[R] mirroring R

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On Sat, Feb 08, 2003 at 08:18:55PM +0200, Ron Ophir wrote:
> Dear supporter,
> Can you tell me please how can I mirroring R at our site?

There is a (old-ish) Perl package / program called mirror which is
frequently employed to do what its name suggests. There is also a more
modern tool called rsync. Lastly, GNU wget (see below) could be used as well
but may be less efficient. You may want to read up on either one. 

> One of the reasons I would like to do this is the fact that 
> it is impossible to update R behind our firewalls.

As a general rule, you should be able to connect past firewalls, both of the
"mery proxy" kind and the "authentication based" type. R on Windows supports
either by using the --internet2 flag which then "borrows" the firewall-
poking capabilities of Internet Explorer.  Also, I believe that Brian Ripley
just added some code to make this possible from within R, but IIRC this
won't be officially available until R 1.7.0 is released.

Alternatively for Windows, or generally speaking on non-Windows, you could
use GNU wget, an extremely versatile download tool ported to many OSs (incl.
all Unix flavours, Windows, and I suspect most Mac flavours).  In its config
file ($HOME/.wgetrc under Unix, or Cygwin), specify the proxy as well as
user + password settings. Then tell R via $HOME/.Rprofile to use wget as the
argument to the download.file.method, as in
	options(download.file.method="wget") 
and you should be all set.  

Hope this helps, mail me off-line is you have more questions,

Dirk

-- 
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. 
				             -- Niels Bohr