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Proposal to limit Internet access during package load

Simon Urbanek 
I?aki,

I fully agree, this a very common issue since vast majority of server deployments I have encountered don't allow internet access. In practice this means that such packages are effectively banned.

I would argue that not even (1) or (2) are really an issue, because in fact the CRAN policy doesn't impose any absolute limits on size, it only states that the package should be "of minimum necessary size" which means it shouldn't waste space. If there is no way to reduce the size without impacting functionality, it's perfectly fine.

That said, there are exceptions such as very large datasets (e.g., as distributed by Bioconductor) which are orders of magnitude larger than what is sustainable. I agree that it would be nice to have a mechanism for specifying such sources. So yes, I like the idea, but I'd like to see more real use cases to justify the effort.

The issue with any online downloads, though, is that there is no guarantee of availability - which is real issue for reproducibility. So one could argue that if such external sources are required then they should be on a well-defined, independent, permanent storage such as Zenodo. This could be a matter of policy as opposed to the technical side above which would be adding such support to R CMD INSTALL.

Cheers,
Simon

Thread (22 messages)

Iñaki Ucar Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 23 Iñaki Ucar Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 23 Simon Urbanek Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 23 Iñaki Ucar Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 26 Simon Urbanek Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 26 Gabriel Becker Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 26 Iñaki Ucar Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 26 Simon Urbanek Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 26 Simon Urbanek Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 26 Iñaki Ucar Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 26 Simon Urbanek Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 26 Gabriel Becker Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 26 Simon Urbanek Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 26 Simon Urbanek Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 26 Bob Rudis Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 26 Dirk Eddelbuettel Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 26 Gabriel Becker Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 26 Iñaki Ucar Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 27 Blätte, Andreas Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 27 Iñaki Ucar Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 27 Tomas Kalibera Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 27 Blätte, Andreas Proposal to limit Internet access during package load Sep 28