Skip to content
Prev 7742 / 21307 Next

[Bioc-devel] Challenges with package installation on fresh R

Hi Vladislav,
On 06/25/2015 01:13 PM, Vladislav Petyuk wrote:
What all these packages have in common is that we don't provide binaries
for them anymore. That's because install.packages() (and thus 
biocLite(), which uses install.packages() internally) knows how to
deal with this (via type="both", which is now the default on Windows
and Mac). However, some core utilities like utils::download.packages()
have not been properly adapted to handle the situation where a binary
is missing. For example with R-3.2.1 on Windows:

   > library(BiocInstaller)
   > download.packages("GO.db", destdir=".", repos=biocinstallRepos())
   trying URL 
'http://bioconductor.org/packages/3.2/data/annotation/src/contrib/GO.db_3.1.2'
   Error in download.file(url, destfile, method, mode = "wb", ...) :
     cannot open URL 
'http://bioconductor.org/packages/3.2/data/annotation/src/contrib/GO.db_3.1.2'
   In addition: Warning message:
   In download.file(url, destfile, method, mode = "wb", ...) :
     cannot open: HTTP status was '404 Not Found'
   Warning in download.packages("GO.db", destdir = ".", repos = 
biocinstallRepos()):
     download of package 'GO.db' failed
        [,1] [,2]

This could be what breaks install_github() (which doesn't seem to
use install.packages() internally but to instead handle the downloading
of the packages itself).

Cheers,
H.