Ken,
On Mar 22, 2007, at 4:12 AM, ken knoblauch wrote:
If it is not too difficult, I would like to request that it be made
easier to interrupt the package installer if, for example, the
local mirror is down. I find that if my local mirror is down, that
when I try to look for packages, I get the spinning beach ball. I
haven't waited long enough to see if it stops with an error, but
I've waited several minutes which I think is a reasonable wait.
The only way I've come up with for getting back control is by force
quitting R. If there are less drastic ways, I'd like to learn
them, but barring that it would be nice to have better control of
this.
Have you tried pressing the Stop button in R (resp. pressing <Esc> in
the console)? If that doesn't help, you can always issue
killall -INT R
in the Terminal which will stop this without quitting R. Currently, I
know of no way around this, because R is single-threaded, so it's
stuck in the connect call while the system waits for the host to
respond, so it cannot even process keyboard or mouse events. If the
host is invalid or your system already detected that the host is
down, then there is no timeout and this is then no issue. If anyone
can think of a solution for this, let me know...
Cheers,
Simon