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", "Version", "Priority",
"Depends", "Imports", "LinkingTo",
"Suggests", "Enhances", "OS_type",
"License" and "Archs", and those fields will always
be included, plus
the file name in field "File" if addFile = TRUE
and the path to the subdirectory in field "Path" if subdirectories
are used.
type
Type of packages: currently source ‘.tar.{gz,bz2,xz}’ archives,
and OS X 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, recursively) or a character vector of name of subdirectories
to include.
latestOnly
logical: if multiple versions of a package are
available should only the latest version be included?
addFiles
logical: should the filenames be included as field
File in the ‘PACKAGES’ file.
Details
write_PACKAGES scans the named directory for R packages,
extracts information from each package's ‘DESCRIPTION’ file, and
writes this information into the ‘PACKAGES’ and
‘PACKAGES.gz’ files.
Including non-latest versions of packages is only useful if they have
less constraining version requirements, so for example
latestOnly = FALSE could be used for a source repository when
foo_1.0 depends on R >= 2.15.0 but foo_0.9 is
available which depends on R >= 2.11.0.
Support for repositories with subdirectories and hence for
subdirs != FALSE depends on recording a "Path" field in
the ‘PACKAGES’ file.
Support for more general file names (e.g., other types of compression)
via a "File" field in the ‘PACKAGES’ file can be
used by download.packages. If the file names are not of
the standard form, use addFiles = TRUE.
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 files
‘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.
See Also
See read.dcf and write.dcf for reading
‘DESCRIPTION’ files and writing the ‘PACKAGES’ and
‘PACKAGES.gz’ files.
Examples
## Not run:
write_PACKAGES("c:/myFolder/myRepository") # on Windows
write_PACKAGES("/pub/RWin/bin/windows/contrib/2.9",
type = "win.binary") # on Linux
## End(Not run)