utils (version 3.2.4)

setRepositories: Select Package Repositories

Description

Interact with the user to choose the package repositories to be used.

Usage

setRepositories(graphics = getOption("menu.graphics"), ind = NULL, addURLs = character())

Arguments

graphics
Logical. If true, use a graphical list: on Windows or OS X GUI use a list box, and on a Unix-alike if tcltk and an X server are available, use Tk widget. Otherwise use a text menu.
ind
NULL or a vector of integer indices, which have the same effect as if they were entered at the prompt for graphics = FALSE.
addURLs
A character vector of additional URLs: it is often helpful to use a named vector.

Value

This function is invoked mainly for its side effect of updating options("repos"). It returns (invisibly) the previous repos options setting (as a list with component repos) or NULL if no changes were applied.

Details

The default list of known repositories is stored in the file ‘R_HOME/etc/repositories’. That file can be edited for a site, or a user can have a personal copy in the file pointed to by the environment variable R_REPOSITORIES, or if this is unset or does not exist, in ‘HOME/.R/repositories’, which will take precedence.

A Bioconductor mirror can be selected by setting options("BioC_mirror"), e.g.\ifelse{latex}{\out{~}}{ } via chooseBioCmirror --- the default value is "http://bioconductor.org".

The items that are preselected are those that are currently in options("repos") plus those marked as default in the list of known repositories.

The list of repositories offered depends on the setting of option "pkgType" as some repositories only offer a subset of types (e.g., only source packages or not OS X binary packages). Further, for binary packages some repositories (notably R-Forge) only offer packages for the current or recent versions of R. (Type "both" is equivalent to "source".)

Repository CRAN is treated specially: the value is taken from the current setting of getOption("repos") if this has an element "CRAN": this ensures mirror selection is sticky.

This function requires the R session to be interactive unless ind is supplied.

Some of the entries have https versions which use https:// for access, so if selected need an R build which supports this. (Choosing the https version provides some guarantees on the identity of the site.)

See Also

chooseCRANmirror, chooseBioCmirror, install.packages.