CRAN problem with plyr-1.4.1

Uwe,

I really do appreciate the help from you and Douglas on resolving this
problem.  However, I respectfully disagree on a few points:

- install.packages() was broken and failing to install successfully.

This is why I was tracking down the URL via the CRAN website.

- I think it's crazy to have an update process that breaks links for ~24
hours every time a package is updated.

day, some significant fraction of R packages just cannot be installed?

Even if you "just" have broken links on the web site, it looks pretty
bad. "Wait till tomorrow" seems like a poor response for a project as
large and widely used as R.

I'll repeat what I told Douglas -- as a user of R, it would be very
helpful if the list of mirrors indicated which one(s) were authoritative
(and by implication, which are unreliable).

Thanks again for your help, and for your work on maintaining R.

Best,
Ian

2011/4/12 Uwe Ligges <ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de
<mailto:ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de>>



    On 11.04.2011 21:03, Douglas Bates wrote:

        The first thing to do is try another mirror.  The "official" (or as
        official as we ever get about anything) U.S. mirror is

        http://cran.us.R-project.org

        They tend to be very good about updating.  Presently the source
        package for plyr is at version 1.5 and the binary versions are
        both at
        1.4.1


    Right, and on CRAN master the update process was running and hence
    you got a 440. Or in other words: Please just be a bit patient after
    a package was updated, the automated processes may take a day to
    complete. You can access the repositories without any problem using
    install.packages() and friends.

    Uwe Ligges



            On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 1:27 PM, Ian
            Davis<ian.w.davis at gmail.com <mailto:ian.w.davis at gmail.com>>
              wrote:
            It looks like there might be some kind of problem with the
            Plyr-1.4.1
            packages pushed to CRAN?  The web pages show 1.4.1 as the
            current version,
            but trying to fetch the source through the provided link
            gives a 404:


            http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/R/CRAN/web/packages/plyr/index.html

            $ wget
            http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/R/CRAN/src/contrib/plyr_1.4.1.tar.gz
            --2011-04-11 13:19:09--
            http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/R/CRAN/src/contrib/plyr_1.4.1.tar.gz
            Resolving lib.stat.cmu.edu... 128.2.241.212
            Connecting to lib.stat.cmu.edu
            <http://lib.stat.cmu.edu>|128.2.241.212|:80... connected.
            HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
            2011-04-11 13:19:09 ERROR 404: Not Found.


            This prevented me from installing ggplot2 until I went back
            and found an old
            version (1.4) of Plyr to install manually.  Since it looks
            like Plyr was
            *just* updated a few days ago, I'm guessing something went
            awry?  I checked
            several CRAN mirrors and got the same problem with all of
            them.  They think
            the current version is 1.4.1, but they don't have any files
            available for
            download.

            Hope this helps,
            Ian

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