On Feb 25, 2005, at 3:11 AM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
install/update.packages will have a lot of changes in 2.1.0, and I have been adding some widgets to go along with this.
- Rather than just CRAN and BIOC, you have a character vector of repositories. There is a function setRepositories() to set the appropriate option().
- There is no default CRAN, but a function chooseCRANmirror() to set a mirror, which is invoked if you try to access CRAN without setting a mirror.
- update.packages(ask="graphics") brings up a listbox for you to de-select
packages (all available updates are pre-selected).
- install.packages() with no/empty pkgs argument brings up a listbox of all available packages (including those inside bundles).
- menu(graphics=TRUE) is implemented.
These can be set up to use widgets where available (Windows, if Tk is available under X11, I hope Aqua before release), and have a text-mode fallback (better than the current menu(), but in that spirit). (Except that is install.packages: text-mode selection from 480 packages even in three columns is not useful to me, but a scrolling list works well as Windows users of R already know.)
My question is:
What should be default be?
Options might be:
- use the graphics widget if available.
- make the graphics the default on Windows (it will always be available,
but not necessarily on the right screen under DCOM uses).
- make text-mode the default on Unix.
- do different things for different tools. Currently setRepositories() and chooseCRANmirror() default to graphics-if-possible, and update.packages() defaults to text mode (which gives more detailed information).
I am not really in favour of making the defaults a set of options, but that is possible.
This is a request for input on what would be a good compromise for general R users (and not just the R-devel audience).
Hi,
Thanks for taking this on - it looks like a big step forward. I have some pretty minor comments/questions. We will, of course, try to adapt the BioC code in time...
We probably want to be sure that any function calling one of these has complete control and can override user defined defaults.
I am not completely clear on your model for how the repositories are searched though. Two questions come to mind: 1) How do I get the most recent version of a package, regardless of which repository it is in? 2) Can a package from one repository have its dependencies resolved in another repository, or not? (this last one is a real can of worms - in my view, as one might really prefer a same repository solution, but that means that repositories might need to completely contain CRAN - which is clearly less desirable). And of course this may be too fine a level of detail, but these problems have come up in our experience.
I think it would be nice if getting dependencies had two (or more levels), so that I could get only those packages that the current package "Depends" on, and a second level where I could
get both the "Suggests" and the "Depends". For me (at least) Suggests is weaker, and for many users the "Suggests" set of packages is not always needed - the "Depends" set, is though. Currently the dependencies option seems to only allow TRUE and FALSE.
Robert
+----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------+
-- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
______________________________________________ R-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
| Robert Gentleman phone: (206) 667-7700 |
| Head, Program in Computational Biology fax: (206) 667-1319 |
| Division of Public Health Sciences office: M2-B865 |
| Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center |
| email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------+
______________________________________________ R-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
