install.packages(repos=NULL) in RStudio

Question

Suddenly RStudio is ignoring the repos = NULL paramater and trying to install from the repositories.

I am calling: install.packages("d:/R/install/truncdist_1.0-1.zip", repos=NULL)

But it is ignoring the repos=NULL and trying to connect to two repositories:

Warning in install.packages :
  unable to connect to 'www.vps.fmvz.usp.br' on port 80.    

Warning in install.packages :
    unable to access index for repository http://www.vps.fmvz.usp.br/CRAN/bin/windows/contrib/3.0

Warning in install.packages :
  unable to connect to 'www.stats.ox.ac.uk' on port 80.

Warning in install.packages :
  unable to access index for repository http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/RWin/bin/windows/contrib/3.0

In the end it installs the package correctly from the local directory, but it takes forever to do it.

This problem does not happen when using only R, it is happening just in RStudio (and RStudio is my main GUI at work).

Does anyone know how to solve this?

PS: I am using RStudio 0.97.551 and R version 3.0.1 .

Answer 1

You can bypass the extra things that RStudio does when installing packages by calling utils::install.packages directly. Alternatively, under the Tools menu, there is an "Install Packages..." dialog which allows in the first dropdown to select installing from "Package Archive File (.zip; .tar.gz)"

The fact that the RStudio version of install.packages does not respect repos=NULL should probably be filed as a bug with RStudio.