cannit get list of binary packages from the GUI

On Mar 16, 2012, at 7:21 PM, Simon Urbanek wrote:

On Mar 16, 2012, at 8:55 AM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

On 16/03/2012 12:31, Ken knoblauch wrote:

Federico Calboli<f.calboli<at>  imperial.ac.uk>  writes:

Apologies, I forgot to say, I have R 2.14.2, latest 64-bit GUI

from http://r.research.att.com/, OS 10.7.3

I just noticed the following weird issue.  If I go to the menu

'Packages and Data',  select 'Package

Installer' the installer goes up, but when I tell it to give the

list of binaries available (I like to keep up

to date, and check every couple of days) the list comes up empty.

The list for CRAN sources, and for

Bioconductor binaries work fine.

I tried to change the mirror, but it does not make a difference.

Am I the only one with the problem? what's going on?

I second this observation.

What is going on is that http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/leopard/contrib/2.14/ has an empty PACKAGES file.  Given that it hadn't been updated for a couple of weeks on Weds, you may just need to be patient.  But in any case, only Simon can fix this as only he has sufficient access to the package builder. So reporting to Simon is always going to be the most effective way forward for similar problems.

Hmm... it's not empty on the master machine -- use http://r.research.att.com as the mirror - it should work ...

Could PACKAGES file be in some damaged state that R cannot process? When I change the repository to that value  in the R64 GUI and try to see either either the binary versions or the source versions of contributed packages in the Package Installer I get these warnings at the console:

Warning: unable to access index for repository  http://r.research.att.com/bin/macosx/leopard/contrib/2.14

Warning: unable to access index for repository  http://r.research.att.com/src/contrib

I am able to see the .tgz packages at http://r.research.att.com/bin/macosx/leopard/contrib/2.14/ with Firefox.

I am able to get a list of source packages (but not binary) to display in the Package Installer if I use a different repository. And I am able to install binary packages with ... for example:

install.packages("actuar", repo="http://r.research.att.com", type="mac.binary.leopard")

(Which updated an existing version to the current version.)

Admittedly I am running a somewhat behind the times version, but this is completely different behavior than it has exhibited up to a few days ago.