R: Generating a PACKAGES file

write_PACKAGES {tools}

R Documentation

Generating a PACKAGES file

Description

Generating a ‘PACKAGES’ file for a repository of source or Windows binary packages.

Usage

write_PACKAGES(dir, fields,
               type = c("source", "mac.binary", "win.binary"),
               verbose = FALSE)

Arguments

dir

Character vector describing the location of the repository (directory including source or binary packages) to generate the ‘PACKAGES’ file from and write it to.

fields

Optional, the fields to be used in the ‘PACKAGES’ file. The default are those needed by available.packages: “Package”, “Bundle”, “Priority”, “Version”, “Depends”, “Suggests”, “Imports” and “Contains”.

type

Type of packages: currently source .tar.gz archives and Windows binary .zip packages are supported. Defaults to "win.binary" on Windows and to "source" otherwise.

verbose

logical. Should packages be listed as they are processed?

Details

type = "win.binary" uses unz connections to read all ‘DESCRIPTION’ files contained in the (zipped) binary packages for Windows in the given directory dir, and builds a ‘PACKAGES’ file from these information.

Value

Invisibly returns the number of packages described in the resulting ‘PACKAGES’ file. If 0, no packages were found and no ‘PACKAGES’ file has been written.

Note

Processing .tar.gz archives to extract the ‘DESCRIPTION’ files is quite slow.

This function can be useful on other OSes to prepare a repository to be accessed by Windows machines, so type = "winBinary" should work on all OSes.

Author(s)

Uwe Ligges and R-core.

Examples

## Not run: 
write_PACKAGES("c:/myFolder/myRepository")  # on Windows
write_PACKAGES("/pub/RWin/bin/windows/contrib/2.1",
               type="win.binary")  # on Linux

## End(Not run)

[Package tools version 2.1.1 ]