Error message library()

Le mercredi 26 octobre 2011 ? 12:34 -0400, Simon Urbanek a ?crit :

Please, no! We don't want to enter the realm of the computer assuming
it knows what you want to do (which is becoming too common nowadays,
unfortunately, making the interaction more and more annoying). For
some users this error simply means that they mistyped the package
name, so fetching CRAN repos on that behalf ranges somewhere between
overkill and stupidity.

If we need to connect to CRAN to do that, I indeed withdraw my
suggestion. I had in mind a feature that's present in Bash in some
recent Linux distributions: when a program doesn't exist on the system,
tell the user in what package it can be found (it also detects typos in
program names).

If the user can't type install.packages() then I am certainly not
confident that the user can use R for any reasonable data analysis.

There's certainly some truth in your statement. ;-)

OTOH it seems package authors have tried raising the barrier to a quite
high level, and even when knowing what you do, you can get the package
names wrong. Consider for example :
Snowball, but snow and snowfall
rJava and rJython, but RODBC and RWeka
(not to pick on Kurt at all, there are many other examples, but I'm
mainly using these - great - packages)

Maybe a less controversial improvement would be to ask "Did you mean
XXX?" if a package with a very similar name is *installed*. That
wouldn't require fetching information from CRAN, and would most of the
time be helpful (people install packages they use).


Regards