[R-pkg-devel] CRAN stable download url?

[Henrik Bengtsson]

On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 12:39 PM, Jonathon Love <jon at thon.cc> wrote:
> hi,
>
> i'm bundling some R packages to go into a flatpak/flathub application. for
> that it is necessary to provide the download URLs for all the required
> dependencies in advance - including R packages. this works, *except* when an
> R package version transitions from being the current version, to being
> archived.
>
> the current version will be, say:
>
> https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/yaml_2.1.16.tar.gz
>
> then when yaml 2.1.17 comes out (which it just has), that url will return a
> 404, and has become:
>
> https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/yaml/yaml_2.1.16.tar.gz
>
> this means everything breaks when a new version of an R package comes out.
>

[Rd] CRAN indices out of whack (for at least macOS)


[Rd] CRAN indices out of whack (for at least macOS)

> does anyone know if a stable url exists for R packages?

Somewhat related: Winston Chang made the following argument in R-devel
thread 'CRAN indices out of whack (for at least macOS)' on 2018-02-03
(https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2018-February/075532.html):

> [...]
> One reason that package installations fail in these cases is that the
> current version of a package is in one directory, and the old
> (archived) versions of a package are in another directory. If current
> and old versions were in the same directory, then package installation
> would not fail.

An obvious, quick solution would be to also put the current version
under https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/ and link to it
but not sure how well that works with the CRAN mirroring setup.

/Henrik

>
> with thanks
>
> jonathon
>
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