Deb-4.0 Etch and sources.list for R

Well, I put the following into /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk/R/bin/linux/debian stable/

(which looks sufficiently "something like" to me). BUT:

When I open the (graphical) Synaptic Package Manager up pops
a window with the message:

  An error occured
  The following details are provided:

  W: Couldn't stat source package list
  http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk stable/ Packages

so I'm puzzled!

Two guesses. First - you've got

deb http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk/R/bin/linux/debian stable/

in sources.list, but report an error relating to a different address:

http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk stable/ Packages

So perhaps there is still a lingering typo somewhere.

Second: you might just need to 'update' prior to trying to access the
new repository in your sources.list. I don't use synaptic, but when I
added the line you quoted above to my sources.list, and ran 

apt-get update

I got the expected result, modulo a GPG error, which I don't think
would prevent me from downloading any packages. An excerpt is pasted
below. 

Otherwise, you can always install.packages() from within R, which
allows you to pull packages in from any repository you want, and may
allow you to get newly revised packages moments ahead of the
ever-diligent Debian maintainers. See the online R help for the
details.

HTH,

Tyler

root:490s# apt-get update  ## output trimmed
Get:1 http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk stable/ Release.gpg [189B]
Ign http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk stable/ Translation-en_CA
Get:3 http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk stable/ Release [1281B]
Ign http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk stable/ Release
Ign http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk stable/ Packages
Get:7 http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk stable/ Packages [8431B]
Fetched 417kB in 15s (26.6kB/s)
Reading package lists... Done
W: GPG error: http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk stable/ Release: The
following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is
not available: NO_PUBKEY 06F90DE5381BA480 
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems
root:490s#

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