[R] Distributing packages online

[Carlos J. Gil Bellosta]

Dear R users,

A customer of mine has asked me to develop a R-package. The sitiuation
is as follows:

1) Being a special purpose package, it does not merit to be uploaded to
any CRAN server. 
2) It is subject to many changes, bug fixes, and the like.
3) It has then to be distributed to a relatively large and sparse base
of users. 

I thought that it would be convenient to have it distributed in the
following way:

1) I upload new versions to a server.
2) I provide a function that points to that server and installs it.

Therefore, users need only invoke this function in order to access the
last package version.

Suppose I upload the package to

http://www.myserver.com/packages/mypackage_X.Y.Z.tar.gz

Typically, several versions would be stored there.

The uploading function should be invoked simply. For instance,

> update.mypackage()

Can anybody give me a hint as to which would be key command in this
function how could the uploading function be defined so that the latest
version would be updated or installed?

Thank you very much for your help.

Carlos J. Gil Bellosta
http://www.datanalytics.com