R: Generate PACKAGES files

write_PACKAGES {tools}

R Documentation

Generate PACKAGES files

Description

Generate ‘PACKAGES’ and ‘PACKAGES.gz’ files for a repository of source or Mac/Windows binary packages.

Usage

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

Arguments

dir

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

fields

a character vector giving the fields to be used in the ‘PACKAGES’ and ‘PACKAGES.gz’ files in addition to the default ones, or NULL (default). The default corresponds to the fields needed by available.packages: "Package", "Bundle", "Priority", "Version", "Depends", "Suggests", "Imports" and "Contains".

type

Type of packages: currently source ‘.tar.gz’ archives, and Mac or Windows binary (‘.tgz’ or ‘.zip’, respectively) packages are supported. Defaults to "win.binary" on Windows and to "source" otherwise.

verbose

logical. Should packages be listed as they are processed?

unpacked

a logical indicating whether the package contents are available in unpacked form or not (default).

subdirs

either logical (to indicate if subdirectories should be included) or a character vector of subdirectories to include.

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 ‘PACKAGES’ and ‘PACKAGES.gz’ files from this information.

Value

Invisibly returns the number of packages described in the resulting ‘PACKAGES’ and ‘PACKAGES.gz’ files. If 0, no packages were found and no files were 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 = "win.binary" 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 2.9.0 ]