[R] problem with install.packages and update.packages

[Renaud Lancelot]

Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

> Well, perhaps the site (which is not www.r-project.org) was unavailable or
> inaccessible when you tried.

Happily it works again, now, but I don't know why...

This morning, I browsed (with IE or Mozilla) 
http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/1.8/PACKAGES when R was 
not able to find it. I tried several times (and was able to download 
contributed packages with my browser) and the same problem occurred each 
time.

>  Internet caches can make sites appear
> available when they are not, and the download processes do try to avoid
> cached copies.
> You seem to have --internet2 as your command-line flag (from the error 
> message), so you do need to check you can access the exact URL *from 
> Internet Explorer*.  (BTW, that is a crucial piece of information that you 
> did not supply.)  If you use Mozilla, why do you have --internet2?

Because I also use this machine in my office. Our network administrator 
wants us to use IE and he configured it to work with the local network 
and the proxy server. When I am home (where I use a dial-up modem), I 
prefer to use Mozilla.

> Note too that if R has not been changed, this is not a problem with R but 
> with your own computer, and we are not going to be able to debug something 
> you changed on your own machine, are we?

Sure, and I did not mean that ! I was just puzzled and worried by this 
unusual behaviour.

Thanks for your reply.

Best regards,

Renaud

> 
> 
> On Sat, 6 Mar 2004, Renaud Lancelot wrote:
> 
> 
>>Dear all,
>>
>>I am working with MS Windows XP Pro (latest update) and a pre-compiled 
>>version of R:
>>
>> > version
>>          _
>>platform i386-pc-mingw32
>>arch     i386
>>os       mingw32
>>system   i386, mingw32
>>status
>>major    1
>>minor    8.1
>>year     2003
>>month    11
>>day      21
>>language R
>>
>>I meet a strange problem with install.packages and update.packages 
>>(called from the menu), that did not occur until today:
>>
>>######
>>
>> > local({a <- CRAN.packages()
>>+ install.packages(select.list(a[,1],,TRUE), .libPaths()[1], available=a)})
>>trying URL `http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/1.8/PACKAGES'
>>Error in download.file(url = paste(contriburl, "PACKAGES", sep = "/"),  :
>>         cannot open URL 
>>`http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/1.8/PACKAGES'
>>In addition: Warning message:
>>InternetOpenUrl failed: `'
>>
>>
>> > update.packages()
>>trying URL `http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/1.8/PACKAGES'
>>Error in download.file(url = paste(contriburl, "PACKAGES", sep = "/"),  :
>>         cannot open URL 
>>`http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/1.8/PACKAGES'
>>In addition: Warning message:
>>InternetOpenUrl failed: `'
>>
>>######
>>
>>I still can access http://www.r-project.org/ and any of its section 
>>(including download) with my browser:
>>
>>Mozilla 1.6
>>Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr-FR; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113
>>
>>The only thing I recently changed on my computer was to update Mozilla 
>>(from 1.5 to 1.6).
>>
>>Any hint will be highly appreciated.
>>
>>Best regards,
>>
>>Renaud
>>
> 
> 


-- 
Dr Renaud Lancelot, vétérinaire
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