[R] Error in readRDS(dest) SOLVED

[Patrick Connolly]

On Wed, 31-May-2017 at 10:05AM -0400, Martin Morgan wrote:

|> On 05/31/2017 04:38 AM, Patrick Connolly wrote:

|> >When I check out those directories in a terminal, there's a big diffrence:
|> >
|> >With R-3.4.0
|> >~ > ll /tmp/RtmpFUhtpY
|> >total 4
|> >drwxr-xr-x 2 hrapgc hrapgc 4096 May 31 10:45 downloaded_packages/
|> >-rw-r--r-- 1 hrapgc hrapgc    0 May 31 10:56 repos_http%3A%2F%2Fcran.stat.auckland.ac.nz%2Fsrc%2Fcontrib.rds
|> >
|> >
|> 
|> The file
|> repos_http%3A%2F%2Fcran.stat.auckland.ac.nz%2Fsrc%2Fcontrib.rds was
|> likely created earlier in your R session. Likely the download a few
|> lines down
|> 
|>                     download.file(url = paste0(repos, "/PACKAGES.rds"),
|>                                   destfile = dest, method = method,
|>                                   cacheOK = FALSE, quiet = TRUE,
|> mode = "wb")
|> 
|> 'succeeded' but created a zero-length file.
|> 
|> You could try to troubleshoot this with something like the
|> following, downloading to a temporary location
|> 
|>   dest = tempfile()
|>   url = "http://cran.stat.auckland.ac.nz/src/contrib/PACKAGES.rds"
|>   download.file(url, dest)
|>   file.size(dest)

That works fine using R-3.3.3 but with R-3.4.0, this happens:

>  download.file(url, dest)
trying URL 'http://cran.stat.auckland.ac.nz/src/contrib/PACKAGES.rds'
Error in download.file(url, dest) : 
  cannot open URL 'http://cran.stat.auckland.ac.nz/src/contrib/PACKAGES.rds'
In addition: Warning message:
In download.file(url, dest) :
  URL 'http://cran.stat.auckland.ac.nz/src/contrib/PACKAGES.rds': status was 'Couldn't connect to server'
> 

Which seems to indicate that something else is preventing connexion to
the server.  Is there something that's changed with the way proxy
servers are used? was the question that led me to check out the
changes in R 3.4.0 which mentions visible changes to download.file().
So I tried method = "internal" which worked!

So making the same setting to the call to install.packages() fixed my
problem.


Thanks for all the suggestions which led me to the solution.  I just
wonder if there could be a more informative error message.

-- 
~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.   
   ___    Patrick Connolly   
 {~._.~}                   Great minds discuss ideas    
 _( Y )_  	         Average minds discuss events 
(:_~*~_:)                  Small minds discuss people  
 (_)-(_)  	                      ..... Eleanor Roosevelt
	  
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