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package development

Mark Bravington 
Hi Terry

I suspect many people struggle with similar issues.

The new version of mvbutils contains a number of routines that facilitate creation & maintenance of a package, hopefully through its entire life-cycle: from "documenting your own stuff for personal use", through "giving out semi-documented code that your mates can use", through "getting it through all the CRAN hoops", through "maintaining & changing an already-installed-and-loaded package".

There is support for creating & editing functions (etc) in your own "development" package while it's already loaded, plus speedy on-the-fly updating of the installed version of the package. These in particular are things that R does not make easy by default (probably for good reasons). Plus: you don't have to learn Rd format if you don't want to-- the package-creator in mvbutils will generate Rd documentation for you based on plain-text documentation.

Use of these package-creation-maintenance routines does require some level of buy-in to 'mvbutils's view of how your working life in R should be organized... basically 'cd' and 'fixr'.  I don't reckon this should be much of a drama for most people, but there are so many different ways of working in R, so who knows?

I use these routines perpetually (maintaining about 6 packages), but as far as the rest of the universe goes, they are still alpha-releases. They are geared to the way I work, and so as yet might not do what others want; however, if there's demand and feasibility, I'm happy to try to incorporate other features. In particular, the documentation is incomplete at present, and I therefore haven't over-advertised the package-maintenance stuff until I get time to write a "how-to" article.

[I've had to release the package-maintenance stuff in a slightly undercooked state, because it is intimately bound to the guts of mvbutils, and it became necessary to roll out a maintenance release of mvbutils for other reasons.]

Let me know if this might be of further interest to you

Mark

Thread (17 messages)

Terry Therneau package development Dec 11 Mathieu Ribatet package development Dec 11 Mark Bravington package development Dec 11 Duncan Murdoch package development Dec 11 Henrik Bengtsson package development Dec 12 Paul Gilbert package development Dec 12 Jeff Ryan package development Dec 12 Paul Gilbert package development Dec 12 Jeff Ryan package development Dec 12 Martin Maechler package development Dec 12 Dirk Eddelbuettel package development Dec 14 Kevin R. Coombes package development Dec 15 Duncan Murdoch package development Dec 15 Kevin R. Coombes package development Dec 15 Duncan Murdoch package development Dec 15 Gabor Grothendieck package development Dec 15 Kevin R. Coombes package development Dec 15