From ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk  Tue Dec 16 23:51:38 2003
From: ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk (Prof Brian Ripley)
Date: Tue Dec 16 23:50:21 2003
Subject: [Rd] getOption("repositories")
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.20.0312161740150.10122-100000@santiam.dfci.harvard.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0312162246060.4051-100000@gannet.stats>

Well,

1) it is not documented and
2) if set, it works in packageStatus().

Relying on undocumented features is bound to cause problems (and I take it
as significant that you silently removed that part of my message).

Any well-weitten code will do something sensible if an option is not set, 
especially an undocumented one.

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003, Jeff Gentry wrote:

> > It isn't needed to be set any more by default: it merely duplicated the
> > information in options CRAN and BIOC.
> 
> IMO, it is more useful then that, however.  The nice thing about
> "repositories" is that it provided one spot which could have 1->n
> repositories listed.  Having a catch all "repositories" option makes it
> easier to add new repositories in the future (functions written to work
> against online repositories only have to work against
> 'getOption("repositories")' and not worry about having to hardcode any
> future repositories) as well as allowing the user to add in repositories
> of their own on their person setup.

Haivng an incorrectly set option seems to me to be worse than useless, and 
that has been the situation.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595


[Rd] getOption("repositories")
Prof Brian Ripley