organisation of packages & CRAN
On Sun, Nov 9, 2014 at 8:24 AM, Steven Sagaert <steven.sagaert at gmail.com> wrote:
Hi, I?ve been using R on and off for a couple of years. I think R is pretty great but one thing I?d like to see improved is the way packages are organised. Instead of CRAN being a long list of packages having a short & usually unintelligible name I ?d like to see packages organised in a hierarchical way with that path acting as a hierarchical namespace just like you have in many other languages like Java, C#,Scala,? The names of the (sub)packages should also be clear and unambiguous & packages should be organised according to their functionality and not just for example be code for a whole book thrown together and given a cryptic name. Next to that it would be nice to have extra metadata in the packages to allow for another more loose flat multi-class class-action like in tagging blog systems & other metadata to allow for for automatically generating something like task views.
Just wanted to point out that this extra metadata idea has been pursued by the Bioconductor BiocViews feature. http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/release/BiocViews.html
Due to the large number of packages it?s hard to see the forest from the trees so a recommendation system for CRAN based on popularity (download statistics) , ratings & other data like related packages from package metadata would be most welcome. Finally the number of packages in CRAN is exponentially growing but there is also a large partial overlap in functionality between packages & so many packages make it hard to find what you are looking for. So maybe there less is more and there should be a system of removing hardly used/low quality packages on a regular basis.
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