[R-SIG-Mac] mac.binary: inconsistent naming

[Jari Oksanen]

I installed the official Mac binary of R.app 2.1.0 today. I tried to 
update all installed packages. Because installing source packages is 
very, very, very slow(*) I decided to update.packages with 
type="mac.binary". However, this results in the following error:

trying URL 
'http://cran.dk.r-project.org/bin/macosx/2.1/ade4_1.3-3.tar.gz'
Error in download.file(url, destfile, method, mode = "wb") :
	cannot open URL 
'http://cran.dk.r-project.org/bin/macosx/2.1/ade4_1.3-3.tar.gz'
In addition: Warning message:
cannot open: HTTP status was '404 Not Found'

So the problem is that update.packages looks for package name *.tar.gz, 
but the repository has packages with name *.tgz. Is there a way to 
circumvent this?

A related problem is that when you install from local binary files, the 
installer expects the type to be tgz. However, R CMD build --binary  
makes a package name *_*_R_powerpc-apple-darwin7.9.0.tar.gz which 
cannot be installed locally before renaming (and again, tar.gz instead 
of tgz is the violation).

Wouldn't it be nice to have these things consistent, in particular for 
us poor mac users who cannot type and hardly now where to find the 
Terminal.app?

Then to slowness marked above as:
(*) I have found out that installing source packages can be extremely 
slow in R.app. It seems that perl pieces in particular are very slow. 
Processing Rd files may take ages (that is minutes to tens of minutes 
per package). This is a property of R.app GUI: if you download the 
source and build to binary in command line, the process is much faster. 
What could be an explanation here?

Enough for today. BTW, thanks for the fine work: not only for the R 
source, but also for the R.app.

cheers, jari oksanen