I have two questions about packaging up code. 1) Weave/tangle advisable? In the course of extending some C code already in S, I had to work out the underlying math. It seems to me useful to keep this information with the code, using Knuth's tangle/weave type tools. I know there is some support for this in R code, but my question is about the wisdow of doing this with C (or Fortran, or other source) code.
Against the advantage of having the documentation and code nicely integrated are the drawbacks of added complexity in the build process and portability concerns. Some of this is mitigated by the existing dependence on TeX. An intermediate approach would be to provide both the web (in the Knuth sense) source and the C output; the latter could be used directly by those not wishing to hassle with web. This isn't ideal, since the resulting C is likely to be a bit cryptic, and if someone edits the C without changing the web source confusion will reign. So do people have any thoughts about whether introducing this is a step forward or back? 2) Modifications of existing packages. I modified the survival package (I'm not sure if that's properly called a "base" package, but it's close). I know in this particular case, if I'm serious, I probably should contact the package maintainer. But this kind of operation will probably be pretty common for me; I imagine many on this list have already done it. In general, is the best thing to do a) package the new routines as a small additional package, with a dependence on the base package if necessary (the particular change I've made actually produces a few distinct files, slight tweaks of existing ones, that can stand on their own) b) package the new things in with the old under the same name as the old (obviously requires working with package maintainter) c) package the new things with the old and give it a new name. I'm also curious about what development strategy is best; I did b), and it seemed to work OK. But I kept expecting it to cause disaster (it probably helped that I usually didn't load the baseline survival packages; clearly that wouldn't be an option if working with one of the automatically loaded packages). Thanks. -- Ross Boylan wk: (415) 502-4031 530 Parnassus Avenue (Library) rm 115-4 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dept of Epidemiology and Biostatistics fax: (415) 476-9856 University of California, San Francisco San Francisco, CA 94143-0840 hm: (415) 550-1062 ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help