[R-sig-Debian] problem with update.packages

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 14 October 2008 at 09:39, Simon Blomberg wrote:
| Hi, is anyone else getting this error? Could this be a bug?:
| 
| > update.packages(ask=FALSE)
| Error in read.dcf(pkgpath, fields = fields) : 
|   Line starting 'unix; ...' is malformed!
| 
| > sessionInfo()
| R version 2.8.0 RC (2008-10-12 r46696) 
| x86_64-pc-linux-gnu 

Confirmed in plain R using the same package built this morning from last
night's tarball from Denmark:  Running update.packages() yields:

> update.packages()
--- Please select a CRAN mirror for use in this session ---
Loading Tcl/Tk interface ... done
Error in read.dcf(pkgpath, fields = fields) :
  Line starting 'unix; ...' is malformed!


OTOH I don't have a problem running my 'update.r' script (included in littler as
/usr/share/doc/littler/examples/update.r) which just downloaded / upgraded
ten packages. It is equivalent to calling 

> repos <- "http://cran.r-project.org"
> lib.loc <- "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library"
> update.packages(repos=repos, ask=FALSE, lib.loc=lib.loc)

and that sequence also works in plain R.  Could someone please dig into
update.packages() ? 

Dirk 

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.