[R] download CRAN packages and proxy config.

[David Brahm]

Joao Pedro W. de Azevedo <jazevedo at provide.com.br> wrote:
> install.packages("quantreg")
> To my surprise this command did not work...
> Error in download.file(url = paste(contriburl, "PACKAGES", sep = "/")...

It took me years to figure out how to get through our firewall, from my
Solaris 2.6 machine (now) running R-1.6.2.  There were 3 crucial steps:

1) In my .Rprofile:  options(download.file.method="wget")
   (The default method "internal" does not seem to work for me.)

2) In my .cshrc:     setenv http_proxy <some.proxy.server>:8000

3) <some.proxy.server> is NOT the name I find in my web browser!  The web
   browser knows the machine that serves "Proxy Auto-Configuration" files, but
   I needed to get the name of an actual proxy server from our local guru.

Hope that helps!
-- 
                              -- David Brahm (brahm at alum.mit.edu)