Skip to content

Who does develop the R core and libs, and how / where is it hosted?

12 messages · oliver, Joshua Ulrich, Brian Lee Yung Rowe +4 more

#
Hello,

I saw Binaries, stable release-souzrces and daily snapshots of R, but
not something like a repository, visible for the public (like on githb for example).

How is the R development handled, what repositories / source code versioning tools
are used, who are the developers?

And is there something like a plan with future goals,
which are planned for the next releases?

Are there areas, where help is needed?
And in which way could support be done?


Ciao,
   Oliver
#
On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 2:29 PM, oliver <oliver at first.in-berlin.de> wrote:
Go to http://www.r-project.org and click the "Developer Page" link in
the left-hand column.
Ibid, and
Go to http://www.r-project.org and click the "Contributors" link in
the left-hand column.
#
On Jan 14, 2013, at 3:29 PM, oliver wrote:

            
Ehm, I would expect a bit better from someone who is on the list for several years ;) - the reading the docs - in particular you'll find answers to most of your questions in the FAQ ...
See developer.r-project.org, other than that features are typically announced in NEWS as they are being implemented.
If you have someone with a good R knowledge, check out the wish list.
Write good packages, provide patches to R, donate to R foundation?

Cheers,
Simon
#
On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 03:50:04PM -0500, Simon Urbanek wrote:
[...]

Well, most often, I just save the mailinglist postings into the folder where it belongs to...
(Less than even lurking, only sometimes reading some postings.)


...and... when I'm not involved in a task, things start to disappear in from mind.
Much traffic in my inbox ;-)

Also I thought, sending a direct question might trigger certain responses.
There are much FAQs around in the web.
A FAQ is less direct, and just one of the many text documents around...

Something like "Future plans in development of R" I would not await to be inside a FAQ.
Future goals I would expect not being part of NEWS.
NEWS is like "what we already have done", not "what our future plans are".
OK, wish list seems to be the right thing.
[...]


"Good packages" might be good (in quality), but not necessarily give
the R project a boost, if only a handful of users would need such a package.

Providing patches maybe would make sense to me.

Donate to R foundation? Hmhh, I would rather donate with via source code.



BTW: I looked up the string "wish list" in some of the mentioned docs (mentioned in this thread)
     but did not found it.
     Can you please point me to it directly?
     Googling for "R wish list" brings me links to a producer of toys.

     Or did you mean I should ask R users for their wishes??!

     (Some R users - on this list - asked for Julia language as a speedup alternative for R a while ago...)
      

Thanks for the response.

All in all it seems like no special things need to be done.
The FSF for example has a page where they ask for support in certain areas,
so, this looks rather urgent.
R seems not to have such urgent needs for support....

=> Question answered.

Ciao,
   Oliver
#
On Jan 14, 2013, at 7:55 PM, Oliver Bandel wrote:

            
Actually, it does hold true - all R documentation is part of the R sources.

Maybe it's a sign of a relative maturity of R that we don't have a particular "milestone"-like agenda. Typically, most things can be supplied as packages - the only reason to touch the core of R itself is if it is something that cannot be done as a package, and given R's modularity that is fortunately not very often the case.

Cheers,
Simon
#
Oliver Bandel <oliver <at> first.in-berlin.de> writes:
[snip]
But do note that most of of them are VERY old ...
[snip]

  These stack overflow questions might provide some useful
perspective (URLs broken to make Gmane happy -- sorry)

stackoverflow.com/questions/4054585/
     how-can-i-contribute-to-base-r-in-small-ways/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8065835/
  proposing-feature-requests-to-the-r-core-team/
#
Hi,
On 01/14/2013 05:04 PM, Simon Urbanek wrote:
[...]
There are many ways one can interpret the lack of an official roadmap
for a software project. However "maturity" is certainly not one I would
have thought of. But maybe I'm biased by having followed to many other
Open Source projects that do have a roadmap, regardless of whether they
consider themselves mature or not.
Or because it could be (and actually was) done as a package but for
some reasons it feels like it belongs to the core? Examples:
parallel, bitops, getParseData, etc...
Modularity would be even better if more things *in core* were made
generics. For example why the stuff in parallel was not made generic?
(at least S3 generic)

Thanks,
H.

  
    
#
On 01/15/2013 03:25 PM, elijah wright wrote:
Sure. And in that particular case the patch wouldn't be hard to produce.

My comment was more in the context of the roadmap discussion. So to
make my point clear I believe that having an official public roadmap
can't hurt, even for a project that has reached some level of maturity.
One obvious benefit is that it provides more opportunity for
discussion/suggestions/input between the community and R core
*before* things happen.
In the case of the parallel package, maybe there are good reasons
for not making the stuff in parallel generic, I don't know. I could
go ahead and start working on a patch now, living in my own world,
following my own dream, but I'd rather try to discuss this a little
bit before. Don't you think?

To make my point even clearer, I think having a public roadmap is by
itself a sign of maturity. Rather than not having one.

Cheers,
H.