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available.packages (PR#9841)

1 message · Brian Ripley

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The documented specification is file:///d:/CRAN (as specified by RFC1738), 
so this is working correctly.

The CHANGES file for 2.2.0 says:

     o   file:// URLs are now interpreted by download.file(),
         download.packages() and url() in the same way as Mozilla-based
         browsers.  That is, the expected form is

                 file:///d:/path/to/file

         with *three* slashes.

The point is that this is file:// + host + / + path/to/file, and host is 
missing.  That some versions of IE did not follow the standard is part of 
the confusion here.

Note that ?available.packages does say

      If a repository is
      local, i.e., the URL starts with '"file:"', then the packages are
      not downloaded but used directly.  (Both '"file:"' and
      '"file:///"' are allowed as prefixes to a file path, the latter
      for an absolute file path.)

but 'file:' does not work with drives on Windows.  That seems clearly to 
rule out your usage.
On Fri, 10 Aug 2007, zivan.karaman at gmail.com wrote:

            
) on Windows.