[R-pkg-devel] download.file and https

[Paul Gilbert]

The difficulty with most workarounds suggested so far is the expanded 
list of dependencies. My package and quantmod, have had a simple 
dependency on download.file in utils. Picking on Dirks suggestion as an 
example, it would add a system dependency on libcurl and an R package 
dependency on curl, which in turn has system dependencies libcurl-devel 
(rpm) or libcurl4-openssl-dev (deb). Furthermore, it suggests testthat, 
knitr, jsonlite, rmarkdown, and magrittr, which means that these and 
their dependencies, imports, and suggests all need to be installed and 
working in order for me to test, and working with R-devel for me to 
submit to CRAN.

Let me mention again that this problem is not specific to my package or 
quantmod. It will be quickly affecting everyone that downloads from US 
government websites, not to mention that other governments and 
commercial web sites may start doing the same thing.

Paul

On 07/03/2015 06:39 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
>
> In random, I do the following, using R 3.2.0 or later with libcurl where
> installed, and Jeroen's lightweight curl::curl otherwise.
>
>
> getConnection <- function(urltxt, ...) {
>      if (getRversion() >= "3.2.0" && capabilities()["libcurl"]) {
>          url(urltxt, ..., method="libcurl")
>      } else {
>          curl(urltxt, ...)
>      }
> }
>
> closeConnection <- function(con) {
>      if (getRversion() >= "3.2.0" && capabilities()["libcurl"]) {
>          close(con)
>      } else {
>          ## nothing to be done for curl()
>      }
> }
>
>
> Hth,  Dirk
>