R has support for libcurl (>= 7.28.0) since R version 3.2.0. This
feature allows the functions functions url() and download.file() to
access secure URLs. With the US government adopting an https-only policy
for federal websites and web services it is increasingly important to
offer secure download facilities to R users. Users will also benefit
from the increased security of downloading and installing R packages
from a CRAN mirror that supports https.
Users can test whether libcurl is supported with:
> capabilities("libcurl")
libcurl
FALSE
Fedora binaries for R do not currently support libcurl. It would be very
helpful if they did. It suffices to have libcurl-devel as a build
requirement and it will be picked up by the configure script.
Martyn
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