On 12 March 2015 at 09:40, arilamst...@gmail.com wrote: | Thanks Dirk. I'm looking at it now. | | At first glance your documentation brings up a good limitation of simply | telling users to type "devtools::install_github()". Namely, what happens when | the census bureau updates their shapefiles, and I subsequently decide to update | the package? Or if I discover an error in the package and decide to update it? | The choroplethr package could have a dependency, and it's not clear how to make | that dependency explicit to the user.
100% agree. In writing drat, and talking to R users about it, I surprisingly often find many (advanced) R users who seem to not use update.packages() at all. R itself has your problem solved by providing repositries. And drat makes creating and filling repositories (the author side) vey easy -- and that we also aid the user side as installation as well as regular updates fall back onto standard R functions: install.packages(), update.packages(). And this does not require any additinal or manual steps on the part of the users (once drat:::add(...) has been added to their startup files). So for this example, you could add a versioned Depends: in the shapefile-using package and update the drat repository with an updated shapefile package. Users of drat and update.packages() would get updates automagically. Dirk -- http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | e...@debian.org ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
