Generate PACKAGES, PACKAGES.gz and PACKAGES.rds
files for a repository of source or Mac/Windows binary packages.
write_PACKAGES(dir = ".", fields = NULL,
type = c("source", "mac.binary", "win.binary"),
verbose = FALSE, unpacked = FALSE, subdirs = FALSE,
latestOnly = TRUE, addFiles = FALSE, rds_compress = "xz")Character vector describing the location of the repository
(directory including source or binary packages) to generate the
PACKAGES, PACKAGES.gz and PACKAGES.rds files
from and write them to.
a character vector giving the fields to be used in the
PACKAGES, PACKAGES.gz and PACKAGES.rds 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 of packages: currently source .tar.{gz,bz2,xz} archives,
and macOS or Windows binary (.tgz or .zip,
respectively) packages are supported. Defaults to
"win.binary" on Windows and to "source" otherwise.
logical. Should packages be listed as they are processed?
a logical indicating whether the package contents are available in unpacked form or not (default).
either logical (to indicate if subdirectories should be included, recursively) or a character vector of names of subdirectories to include (which are not recursed).
logical: if multiple versions of a package are available should only the latest version be included?
logical: should the filenames be included as field
File in the PACKAGES file.
The type of compression to be used for
PACKAGES.rds: see saveRDS. The default is the
one found to give maximal compression, and is as used on CRAN.
Invisibly returns the number of packages described in the resulting
PACKAGES, PACKAGES.gz and PACKAGES.rds files. If
0, no packages were found and no files were written.
write_PACKAGES scans the named directory for R packages,
extracts information from each package's DESCRIPTION file, and
writes this information into the PACKAGES, PACKAGES.gz
and PACKAGES.rds files, where the first two represent the
information in DCF format, and the third serializes it via
saveRDS.
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 files.
Support for more general file names (e.g., other types of compression)
via a "File" field in the PACKAGES files 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, PACKAGES.gz and PACKAGES.rds files from
this information.
For a remote repository there is a tradeoff between download speed and
time spent by available.packages processing the
downloaded file(s). For large repositories it is likely to be
beneficial to use rds_compress = "xz".
See read.dcf and write.dcf for reading
DESCRIPTION files and writing the PACKAGES and
PACKAGES.gz files. See update_PACKAGES for
efficiently updating existing PACKAGES and PACKAGES.gz
files.
# NOT RUN {
write_PACKAGES("c:/myFolder/myRepository") # on Windows
write_PACKAGES("/pub/RWin/bin/windows/contrib/2.9",
type = "win.binary") # on Linux
# }
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