Strategy for downloading packages
On Wed, 19 Nov 2008, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
I have a client who wants to install R and a custom package on a machine with no internet connection, so he wants to put everything needed on a CDROM and install from there. I've told him how to work out what is needed, but it seems that too much manual work is needed: he needs to install the packages from .zip files (this is Windows) in the right order so dependencies are met, etc.
I don't think the install order matters for binary packages (on Windows or elsewhere). install.packages() certainly does not optimize it.
Is there an automated tool to do this? That is:
The easiest way is to copy a repository to the CD-ROM, and point repos at that (as a file::// URL). You can even add files and rebuild the PACKAGES file (using tools::write_PACKAGES). But if the list of packages never changes, why not just install them in a separate library and burn that on the CD-ROM?
- start from an R installation that's working, and then follow the dependency tree from a specified list of packages to generate a list of packages to download - download all the .zip or .tar.gz files for those from CRAN (possibly listing the ones that don't exist there, because they are local custom ones) - produce a script that can be run to install all of them on a new R install. Duncan Murdoch
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Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595