Re: [Rd] Re: [R] A long digression on packages
Dirk Eddelbuettel [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: 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? You might want to have a closer look at the way recommended packages are handled by an R distribution build, using rsync, links, timestamps, and makefile rules. -- O__ Peter Dalgaard Blegdamsvej 3 c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics 2200 Cph. N (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen Denmark Ph: (+45) 35327918 ~~ - ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) FAX: (+45) 35327907 __ R-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
Re: [Rd] Re: [R] A long digression on packages
On 5 June 2005 at 17:31, Peter Dalgaard wrote: | Dirk Eddelbuettel [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: | | 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? | | You might want to have a closer look at the way recommended packages | are handled by an R distribution build, using rsync, links, | timestamps, and makefile rules. And recode/adapt that for the packages I am interested in? Works, but doesn't scale. But maybe I am misunderstanding you here. 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
Re: [Rd] Re: [R] A long digression on packages
On 6/5/05, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Duncan Murdoch wrote: Of course, with disk sizes as they are now, it's not unreasonable to install all of the contributed CRAN packages on a PC. Then help.search() *will* do searches through them all. Some of them are very specialized, and some of them have non-CRAN dependencies. I've done a few load everything from CRAN operations on my Linux boxes, only to overflow the warnings list with missing Linux software. And, as an example, I have zero use for molecular biology packages. Dirk Eddelbuettel has done a lot of work integrating the CRAN and other R package collections with the Debian GNU/Linux package management system. This rather neatly solves the non-CRAN dependency problems, at least for Debian. Other people have done similar things for Perl packages and Common Lisp packages, both in Debian and in Gentoo's Portage package management system. CRAN could easily be integrated into Portage, but nobody has stepped forward to volunteer. Maybe when I retire ... :) And where does this leave Windows users? There's nothing like Debian or Portage for them; CRAN would have to build it from scratch. I think that some time ago there was a discussion of having a downloadable file that oould be used to help.search through so that a relatively small download and no package installation would allow a comprehensive offline help.search of all CRAN packages. An online version of help.search might be another possibility. __ R-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
Re: [Rd] Re: [R] A long digression on packages
Gabor Grothendieck wrote: I think that some time ago there was a discussion of having a downloadable file that oould be used to help.search through so that a relatively small download and no package installation would allow a comprehensive offline help.search of all CRAN packages. An online version of help.search might be another possibility. There are some great open source indexing and search tools available, given documentation in HTML or PDF formats. One I'm rather fond of is swish-e, which can be found at *http://www.swish-e.org/ There is a Windows native version available, IIRC, although I've only used it on Linux systems. * __ R-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
Re: [Rd] Re: [R] A long digression on packages
On 5 June 2005 at 12:48, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: | Dirk Eddelbuettel has done a lot of work integrating the CRAN and other | R package collections with the Debian GNU/Linux package management | system. This rather neatly solves the non-CRAN dependency problems, at | least for Debian. Thanks for the kind mention but I'm afraid that is actually not quite correct. We do now have some 50 or so CRAN packages in Debian ... but that does not solve the updating problem. I.e. if you install those Debian packages, and then ask R to do update.packages() it has no notion of what came from manual installation (and should get updated) and what came from Debian and should get a new package via apt-get. In Quantian, I use the existing Debian package and then fill 'by hand' to get fairly complete coverage. Also, compared to CRAN, we're not providing that much coverage. There is, however, work going on behind the scenes to provide /most/ of CRAN via auto-generated Debian packages, preferably in an apt-get'able archive. We're not ready yet to lift the curtain. But if there's someone out here in the Debian and R intersection interested and willing to help (with some crude Perl coding), let me/us know and we'll get you involved. Regards, 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
