dealing with package bundles (was RE: [R] Gregmisc)

On Thu, 10 Mar 2005, Liaw, Andy wrote:

One problem that I can see is that it seems like once a package bundle is
installed, R basically has no knowledge that the packages belong to one
bundle, other than the fact that the DESCRIPTION files of the packages have
entries that indicate that they are part of a bundle.  Are there ways to
figure out such information other than checking packageDescription() of all
installed packages?

No.

As from 2.1.0, install.packages() will install a bundle given the name of 
a package it contains (at least if the repositories supply the 
information), so there will be little need for users to know about 
bundles.

This is likely to be considered a kludgy approach, but one way of
linking packages to bundles with a more global approach (as opposed to
one package at at time) is the following:

# Get the set of currently installed packages, taking
# just the package and bundle names
Pkgs.Installed <- installed.packages()[, c("Package", "Bundle")]

# Get the packages that are in bundles
# "Bundle" will be NA if package is not in a bundle
Pkgs.Installed[!is.na(Pkgs.Installed[, "Bundle"]), ]


On my system, where I have installed all CRAN packages that do not
require third party libs, I get the following:

Pkgs.Installed[!is.na(Pkgs.Installed[, "Bundle"]), ]

Package       Bundle
CoCo        "CoCo"        "CoCo"
CoCoCg      "CoCoCg"      "CoCo"
CoCoCore    "CoCoCore"    "CoCo"
CoCoGraph   "CoCoGraph"   "CoCo"
CoCoObjects "CoCoObjects" "CoCo"
CoCoOldData "CoCoOldData" "CoCo"
CoCoRaw     "CoCoRaw"     "CoCo"
Greene      "Greene"      "Ecdat"
Hayashi     "Hayashi"     "Ecdat"
MASS        "MASS"        "VR"
class       "class"       "VR"
dse1        "dse1"        "dse"
dse2        "dse2"        "dse"
gdata       "gdata"       "gregmisc"
gmodels     "gmodels"     "gregmisc"
gplots      "gplots"      "gregmisc"
gtools      "gtools"      "gregmisc"
nnet        "nnet"        "VR"
spatial     "spatial"     "VR"
svDialogs   "svDialogs"   "SciViews"
svGUI       "svGUI"       "SciViews"
svIDE       "svIDE"       "SciViews"
svIO        "svIO"        "SciViews"
svMisc      "svMisc"      "SciViews"
svSocket    "svSocket"    "SciViews"
svViews     "svViews"     "SciViews"
tframe      "tframe"      "dse"

One could then feasibly manipulate this information as one desires.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz