url, readLines, source behind a proxy

Hi Renaud,

On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 12:22 AM, Renaud Gaujoux
<renaud at mancala.cbio.uct.ac.za>  wrote:

Hi Henrik,

<snip>

Could anybody behind a proxy check if the issue can be reproduced?
My proxy is in fact provided by cntml, which acts as a local proxy that
takes care of tricky authentication protocols with the actual university
proxy, not natively supported by my system (Ubuntu). Anybody in this case?

I can replicate this on a WinXP system, where I normally have to use
the --internet2 flag to get internet access through a proxy.

?download.file has a section on "Setting Proxies", which describes how
to use environment variables to set proxy information.  Setting
http_proxy='http://my.proxy.com/' was enough for me to get R CMD
check to run successfully with the --as-cran flag.

Thanks.
Renaud

Best,
--
Joshua Ulrich  |  FOSS Trading: www.fosstrading.com

R/Finance 2012: Applied Finance with R
www.RinFinance.com

On Tue, 17 Apr 2012, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 1:01 AM, Renaud Gaujoux
<renaud at mancala.cbio.uct.ac.za>  wrote:

Hi,

when I run R CMD check with flag --as-cran, the process hangs at stage:

* checking CRAN incoming feasibility ...

Doesn't it time-out eventually?  I'm not behind a proxy but when I've
been running 'R CMD check' whenon very poor 3G connection, it had
eventually timed out.

/Henrik

I am pretty sure it is a proxy issue.
I looked at the check code in the tools package and it seems that the issue
is in the local function `.repository_db()` (defined in
`tools:::.check_package_CRAN_incoming()`), which eventually calls `url()`
with argument open="rb", that hangs probably because it does not use the
proxy settings.
I had a similar issue with `source()`, which apparently uses internal
network functions (not as download.file), but is supposed to work behind a
proxy (correct?).
Does anybody else have this problem?

I was wondering if there is a way around, as I would like to be able to use
--as-cran for my checks.
Thank you.

Renaud

--
Renaud Gaujoux
Computational Biology - University of Cape Town
South Africa