Runnable R packages

Sounds interesting. Do you have it on GitHub or similar?

Rainer

On 8 Feb 2019, at 09:09, David Lindelof <lindelof at ieee.org> wrote:

Yesterday I wrote and submitted to CRAN a package `run`, which implements
the ideas discussed in this thread. Given a package tarball
foo_0.1.0.tar.gz, users will be able to run

Rscript -e "run::run('foo_0.1.0.tar.gz')"

which will pull all the dependencies of package `foo`, lookup a function
`main` in that package's namespace, and call it.

It's an early draft but I'd appreciate any feedback (once its submission is
accepted, of course).

Thanks all for your help and advice,

David

On Sat, Feb 2, 2019 at 3:37 PM Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>
wrote:

On 02/02/2019 8:27 a.m., Barry Rowlingson wrote:

I don't think anyone denies that you *could* make an EXE to do all
that. The discussion is on *how easy* it should be to create a single
file that contains an initial "main" function plus a set of bundled
code (potentially as a package) and which when run will install its
package code (which is contained in itself, its not in a repo),
install dependencies, and run the main() function.

Now, I could build a self-executable shar file that bundled a package
together with a script to do all the above. But if there was a "RUN"
command in R, and a convention that a function called "foo::main"
would be run by `R CMD RUN foo_1.1.1.tar.gz` then it would be so much
easier to develop and test.


I don't believe the "so much easier" argument that this requires a
change to base R.  If you put that functionality into a package, then
the only extra effort the user would require is to install that other
package.  After that, they could run

Rscript -e "yourpackage::run_main('foo_1.1.1.tar.gz')"

as I suggested before.  This is no harder than running

R CMD RUN foo_1.1.1.tar.gz

The advantage of this from R Core's perspective is that you would be
developing and maintaining "yourpackage", you wouldn't be passing the
burden on to them.  The advantage from your perspective is that you
could work with whatever packages you liked.  The "remotes" package has
almost everything you need so that "yourpackage" could be nearly
trivial.  You wouldn't need to duplicate it within base R.

Duncan Murdoch


If people think this adds value, then if they want to offer that value
to me as $ or ?, I'd consider writing it if their total value was more
than my cost....

Barry


On Sat, Feb 2, 2019 at 12:54 AM Abs Spurdle <spurdle.a at gmail.com> wrote:


Further to my previous post,
it would be possible to create an .exe file, say:

my_r_application.exe

That starts R, loads your R package(s), calls the R function of your

choice

and does whatever else you want.

However, I don't think that it would add much value.
But feel free to correct me if you think that I'm wrong.

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