/argus

A geolocation service written for use by the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN)

Primary LanguageR

sharder

When you try to install or update a package through RStudio, it finds a decent mirror in its internal network and grabs the files from that. When you try to install or update a package through another IDE, or the REPL, or any other mechanism, the defaults don't let you do that.

sharder is a service I've been developing for the CRAN administrators that geolocates the IPs of incoming requests and directs them to a randomly-selected mirror in their country, with the ability to filter down to https-supporting mirrors where available. The plan is to deploy it and have it act as an intermediary, so that code>install.packages logic will go:

  1. If they've specified a mirror, use that:
  2. If they haven't, query sharder;
  3. If sharder can't find anything, then ask.

This should dramatically cut down the amount of time R programmers spend looking at 117-option menus in their terminal.