I didn't understand this either. Perhaps Seth could explain it. [I've
added Seth back to the recipients.]
In particular, GPL requires the sources to be made available, and if the
source package is not the sources, where are they made available? So for
a GPL-ed package it seems completely reasonable to contribute patches to
the source package.
The only thing I can guess is that a very small number of packages are
kept in some other form, e.g. to be pre-processed into R and S-PLUS
variants or in some web-like form (in the sense of 'web' used for TeX,
mixing code and documentation). But the unequivocal statement
it is not in the form used to develop the package
is false for e.g. the stats package and the VR bundle.
On Wed, 23 Nov 2005, Bjørn-Helge Mevik wrote:
Seth Falcon wrote:
Actually, R source packages are also mangled. While the source is
readable, it is not in the form used to develop the package.
I haven't seen this behaviour. At least for the simple package I'm
maintaining (pls), the only file in the source package that is changed
by R CMD build, is DESCRIPTION. All .R and .Rd files are untouched
(even the modification dates are unchanged). (This is on a Linux
system, I don't know how it works on MS/Mac.)
It's the same Perl code.
--
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
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