Dear Erik, Le lundi 23 octobre 2017 11:16:05 UTC+2, Erik Bray a écrit : > > On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 5:19 PM, Emmanuel Charpentier > <emanuel.c...@gmail.com <javascript:>> wrote: > > Again : R is not only a software package but also an ecosystem. The > 11638 > > (as of today) packages available to R users are a large part of R > usefulness > > to its users. So, "disabling downloads from CRAN" is *NOT* fine (to > them, at > > least...). > > I'm not saying it shouldn't be possible to install R packages at all, > any less than it should be possible to install Python packages. My > point here was that with Python, for example, one can manually > download a package tarball or wheel from PyPI using, say, curl for > example (maybe if they running on an air-gapped network this was done > on a separate machine and sneaker-netted over, etc.). pip can then > install from the manually downloaded package file. > > I don't know if the same is possible with R but you'd think it should > be. However R installs packages the sequence still has to be > something like > > 1) Download package from CRAN > 2) Verify that package downloaded successfully (maybe it does this > maybe it doesn't) > 3) Install the package > > So it should be possible to do steps 1 and 2 manually, and then skip > straight to 3. Admittedly running R on an air-gapped network is > probably not a situation the developers have in mind but I have very > little doubt that the use case exists. >
Indeed, it *is* possible to install a manually downloaded package (not as straightforward as the automatic download-and-install default method). But the problem isn't here : There are a large number of CRAN packages (11660 as of this morning). More and more of these packages have mutual dependencies, which are easily accounted for bu install.packages() but are a pain to deal with "manually". In fact, the problem (roughly) has same magnitude as the maintainance of your operating system : it *is* indeed possible to maintain a Unix/Linux installation using only tarballs conveyed to the system via sneakersnet, but it' certainly a) not fun and b) chronophage to the extreme... As it happened with Linux distributions, these intermutual dependencies, which started scarce and lightweight, are getting more and more important. My prediction (or prognostication, or oracle, if you wish...;-) is that they will reach the level of complexity of operating system distributions in an amount of time short enough for this problem to be of interest to all but the oldest (i. e. closest to retirement or death) of R users. I'm not old enough to not feel concerned ;-)... > And, BTW : which is your vote ? > > My vote now is for a re-vote :) > Not possible, given the terms of the vote (I can't pull an after-the-fact rule on the people who have already voted). But whatever the result is, there will remain the question of implementation, which might need a formal vote on sub-issues and methods -- Emmanuel Charpentier -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
