[R] R binaries

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 31 Aug 2005, Berwin A Turlach wrote:

> G'day Nam-Ky,
>
>>>>>> "NKN" == Nam-Ky Nguyen <nkn at turing.une.edu.au> writes:
>
>    NKN> I intend to burn some R CDs to colleagues in Vietnam.  I want
>    NKN> to put all binary files for base as well as contributed
>    NKN> packages (for both Windows and Linux).
> I don't believe that precompiled binary files for Linux exist, since
> they would depend very much on which flavour of Linux you are running.
>
>    NKN> It is very time consuming if I download files by files. Is
>    NKN> there a place a can buy a CD with all the mentioned files?
> Not that I am aware off.  But I would do the following for easy
> download of all contributed files:  Issue  from an R session the
> following commands (mostly untested):
>
>> options(repos=c(CRAN="http://cran.au.r-project.org/"))
>> tmp <- available.packages()  # Or just use CRAN.packages() ??
> ## To download all source files
>> download.packages(tmp, destdir=".")
> ## To download all windows binary
>> download.packages(tmp, destdir=".", type="win.binary")
>
> If you do it from a Windows machine, you may have to adapt the destdir
> argument in those commands.  Also, if you sit behind a proxy, then you
> might have to first issue an appropriate
> 'Sys.putenv("http_proxy"="put your proxy here")' command.
>
> available.packages() does not seem to have a type argument according
> to its documentation, so I guess that even if it is run under Windows
> that it returns a list of all source packages available in contrib.

Depends on what contriburl is set to, but the default under Windows is 
binary packages.  See my article in the current R-Newsletter.

The default argument is contrb.url(getOption("repos")), and contrib.url 
does have a type argument (and its default is getOption("pkgType") ).

> If some of those are not available as a precompiled windows binary,
> the download.packages() command will probably fail with an error, so
> you have to do the download in bits and pieces, removing offending
> entries from `tmp' -- but that should be still faster than downloading
> file by file (presumably by clicking in a web browser?).  (The
> development version of R should now be more robust (Thanks again,
> Brian) when downloading and just continue downloading the remaining
> files if it encounters an error.  But I don't know where you run (or
> what to run) R-devel ;-) ).
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> Cheers,
>
>        Berwin
>
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-- 
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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595