Jim raises good points, as do the replies. On the topic of '500+ and growing', let me add my pet peeve: It is mighty impossible to know /what/ changed /when/ in CRANland.
Being Debian maintainer for a fair number of packages, I owe users of those packages timely updates. But the best I can do is to look at the timestamp-sorted source directory http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/?M=D That is tedious, as well as error-prone. Moreover, as an R user, I'd like to know what is being added and, and what is being changed. There is no way to know right now. I would not be hard to write a little monitoring script that looks at the directory (and keeps tab in a Rdata structure, or SQLite db, or ...) and spits out either emails, or maybe rss-feed updates, of either or both of 'new packages' or 'new versions'. If additionally we would enforce (err let's start with encourage) a standardised changelog (say $SRC/inst/CHANGES or $SRC/inst/ChangeLog) then that could get parsed too. I had meant to play with some code for this for a while now but it just hasn't happened. Whining on a list is easier than writing code, unfortunately... Comments? Dirk -- Statistics: The (futile) attempt to offer certainty about uncertainty. -- Roger Koenker, 'Dictionary of Received Ideas of Statistics' ______________________________________________ R-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
