[R] CDs for R?

[Duncan Murdoch]

On Tue, 16 Nov 2004 21:39:14 -0000 (GMT), (Ted Harding)
<Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk> wrote:

>Hi Folks,
>
>I'm sure I'm speaking for more than a few (though
>possibly a minority) here.
>
>There's something of a hidden assumption that R users
>can readily download whatever they need from CRAN.
>
>Some of us are on narrow bandwidth dialup connections,
>so downloading large quantities of stuff is out of the
>question (e.g. at approx. 5min/MB, it would take over
>2 days to download a single CD). The meat of CRAN
>(including contributed packages and documentation)
>is enough to fill 5 CDs, though one individual probably
>wouldn't be interested in all of that.
>
>(And, before anyone asks, no I won't be seeing broadband
>in the foreseeable future!)

The tarballs for the base source installation are only around 10 MB.
That's only 50 minutes for you to do the main download. Then you can
pick and choose what other packages to install.  (It's 23 MB to
download the Windows binary; I don't know the size of the Linux
binaries.)

Is it really worth setting up a duplication service?  How much would
you think is reasonable to pay for a CD to be mailed to you?

Duncan Murdoch