Hello, I hope the is the right list to send this suggestion to. I was wondering if it might be possible to have CRAN store the most current version of a package's source tarball at a location that does not change. As an example, the source tarball for `httr` is stored at https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/httr_1.3.1.tar.gz. However, once the next version of `httr` is released, the URL for version 1.3.1 of `httr` will change to https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/httr_1.3.1.tar.gz.
The implications of this are that if I want to write a script which installs version 1.3.1 of `httr`, I need to do so like this: ``` httr_url <- "https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/httr_1.3.1.tar.gz"; curl_result <- system(paste0("curl --head ", httr_url), intern=TRUE) if (grepl("404", curl_result[1])) { httr_url <- " https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/httr_1.3.1.tar.gz"; } install.packages(httr_url) ``` I think there are two obvious ways of remedying this issue. The first would be to simply archive the most recent version along with all the old versions. Then to install a specific version of a package, it would just be: ``` install.packages(" https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/httr_1.3.1.tar.gz";) ``` even if 1.3.1 is the most recent version of `httr`. The other way to remedy this issue would be to simply not use the `/Archive/` sub-directory. So if I wanted to install an old version of `httr` it would be: ``` install.packages("https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/httr_1.3.0.tar.gz";) ``` despite the fact that version 1.3.0 is not the most recent version. I believe the first way would be a better choice because then any existing scripts which reference URLs which include `/Archive/` would still work. However I do not have strong opinions on how this should be implemented, I would just like a URL which points to a certain version of a package that will never change. Thank you, - Kurt [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
