[R-SIG-Mac] interrupting the package installer

[Simon Urbanek]

Ken,

On Mar 22, 2007, at 4:12 AM, ken knoblauch wrote:

> If it is not too difficult, I would like to request that it be made  
> easier to interrupt the package installer if, for example, the  
> local mirror is down.  I find that if my local mirror is down, that  
> when I try to look for packages, I get the spinning beach ball. I  
> haven't waited long enough to see if it stops with an error, but  
> I've waited several minutes which I think is a reasonable wait.   
> The only way I've come up with for getting back control is by force  
> quitting R.  If there are less drastic ways, I'd like to learn  
> them, but barring that it would be nice to have better control of  
> this.

Have you tried pressing the Stop button in R (resp. pressing <Esc> in  
the console)? If that doesn't help, you can always issue
killall -INT R
in the Terminal which will stop this without quitting R. Currently, I  
know of no way around this, because R is single-threaded, so it's  
stuck in the connect call while the system waits for the host to  
respond, so it cannot even process keyboard or mouse events. If the  
host is invalid or your system already detected that the host is  
down, then there is no timeout and this is then no issue. If anyone  
can think of a solution for this, let me know...

Cheers,
Simon