[R] R-2.6.0 - packages installation through a proxy - not working

[Liviu Andronic]

Hello everyone,

I run R on Gentoo Linux and this week I upgraded R from 2.5.0 to
2.6.0. With the new build, I have stumbled upon an unpleasant problem:
I can no longer install packages from CRAN through a transparent
proxy. With the previous version, I simply added to
/usr/lib/R/etc/Renviron the following line and it functioned like a
charm:
## Proxy settings
http_proxy="SERVER:3128"

With 2.6.0, however, R refuses to connect to the CRAN mirror. I have
added to the new Renviron even more lines (useless, probably). Now the
Proxy settings look like this:
## Proxy settings
http_proxy="SERVER:3128"
https_proxy="SERVER:3128"
ftp_proxy="SERVER:3128"

I also tried - with no luck - to use the following command at the
start of the R session:
Sys.setenv(http_proxy="SERVER:3128")

I get the following error message:
> install.packages("Rcmdr", dependencies=TRUE)
--- Please select a CRAN mirror for use in this session ---
Error in open.connection(file, "r") : unable to open connection
In addition: Warning message:
In open.connection(file, "r") :
  unable to connect to 'cran.r-project.org' on port 80.
Loading Tcl/Tk interface ... done
Warning: unable to access index for repository
http://cran.stat.unipd.it/src/contrib
Warning message:
In install.packages("Rcmdr", dependencies = TRUE) :
  package 'Rcmdr' is not available


So, is this a bug in R-2.6.0 or did anything change in the way these
settings are handled?

Regards,
Liviu