[R] What happened to Canada?

[Rolf Turner]

Thanks Martin.  This is illuminating.

On 03/11/15 12:30, Morgan, Martin wrote:
> The first error, about 'unsupported scheme' is saying that you (your
> R) does not have SSL support (as you tracked down, the problem is
> trying to read the online repositories using https://, and the
> 'unsupported scheme' is https). The code then goes on and uses the
> snapshot of mirrors available at the time your R was installed by
> reading a local file.
>
> Your R may be using the 'internal' method (which does not support
> https) or a libcurl without SSL support. I have
>
>>   # ok, using libcurl
> libcurl TRUE

That seems to be the crux of the matter.  When I do

  capabilities()["libcurl"]

I get

libcurl
   FALSE

>
> and my libcurl supports SSL
>
> $ curl-config --features SSL IPv6 libz AsynchDNS IDN NTLM NTLM_WB
> TLS-SRP

It would seem that I have libcurl on my system.  When I do

$ curl-config --features

I get the same results that you show *except* for "TLS-SRP".

(Does the latter matter?)

>
> I got SSL capability through the package
>
> $ dpkg --get-selections |grep libcurl4 libcurl4-openssl-dev:amd64
> install
>
> Your R might have been compiled without libcurl  (depending on how
> you installed R and the libraries present at installation time), or
> with a libcurl that does not have SSL.

Well, I would seem to have installed R without libcurl capabilities.
So how *do* I get libcurl capabilities?

I would have thought something like

    ./configure --with-libcurl

would be called for, but doing ./configure --help produced nothing that 
involved "curl" at all.

Can you enlighten me? Ta.

In the mean time, you can
> quieten things (and live insecurely) with options(useHTTPS=FALSE).
>
> There is some discussion in ?download.file for the `method`
> argument.

As I have previously said, there are no real problems at the moment --- 
*except* for the fact that I am "living insecurely".  I don't like that,
and would prefer to do something about it.

cheers,

Rolf

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