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odd warning looking up Bioconductor packages

2 messages · Federico Calboli, David Winsemius

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Hi All,

I am using R version 3.4.3 Patched (2017-12-05 r73849) R.app GUI 1.70 (7463) x86_64-apple-darwin15.6.0 on MacOS 10.13.2.  Using R.app I am looking for Bioconductor packages, and using the package installer I get the following warning:

Warning: unable to access index for repository http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/3.6/extra/bin/macosx/el-capitan/contrib/3.4:
  cannot open URL 'http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/3.6/extra/bin/macosx/el-capitan/contrib/3.4/PACKAGES?

despite the fact I do get a list of available packages (screenshot attached).

I emailed the bioconductor devs but it is not clear what is going on, aside than my R is looking for a webpage that is a 404.  I was wondering whether this is a peculiarity of my own machine or whether it has been encountered elsewhere.  Assuming it is my machine, is there a way of making said warning go away?

Cheers

F

[cid:EC3117B7-6BBF-430A-989C-541AE9067A1E]

--
Federico Calboli
LBEG - Laboratory of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Genomics
Charles Deberiotstraat 32 box 2439
3000 Leuven
+32 16 32 87 67





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2 days later
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I've been getting the same warning for a while. The BioConductor approved way is to use `source("https://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R"); biocLite(c("pkg_name")). It has not affected my ability to install BioC packages, so I've been ignoring it. The other reason I've been ignoring it is that I'm not using the approved method. I thought it is from R.app using an old address with the "http" not being "https" some place in the Package Installer script.

I can get it just by clicking on the "Get List" button of the GUI Package Installer panel with Bioconductor (binaries) selected. If I choose to reinstall pkg:"a4" is get the warning again then 

trying URL 'http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/3.6/bioc/bin/macosx/el-capitan/contrib/3.4/a4_1.26.0.tgz'
Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 966139 bytes (943 KB)

.... followed by the reports of success and then another warning. So maybe it's not the "http" but rather the target website.