R "sumo" package suggestion
On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 15:59:09 -0500 Liaw, Andy wrote:
Good idea, IMHO, but there are some practical difficulties: I guess the XEmacs packages are (most, if not all) pure elisp code, and do not need other stuff to work. However, quite a few CRAN packages depend on external libraries or programs, and do not necessarily work on all platforms that R runs on. How would such dependencies be resolved in such a kitchen sink bundle? I have a somewhat related idea: Start labelling packages with a set of pre-defined categories, and a package can be labelled with more than one categories (especially those *misc type packages). It is then possible to have facility to let people install all packages that fall in a particular category (e.g., `spatial statistics'). I believe several systems have such facilities, Debian being one of them, TeXLive being another.
This is similar to idea that has been discussed from time to time for several years now: it would be nice to have maintained "CRAN task views" (or something like that), i.e., we could have a maintainer for, say "spatial stats", another one for "machine learning", "biostats" which can of course be overlapping. Then the maintainers would have to produce some sort of list of packages (in a standardized format) with a little bit of markup such that a web page can be generated from it and that the information could be used by install.packages(). I think most users would profit from that, but nobody has done the work to provide the infrastructure so far. I've just discussed this with Kurt again, a week ago or so...I wanted to play around with some ideas, but didn't get round to really do something yet. But hopefully, I'll get round to work on this in the next weeks. Z
Just my $0.02... Andy
From: Rodney Sparapani r-help: I have an R package suggestion. After spending several hours the other day installing about a dozen packages, I had an idea. In xemacs, there is a "sumo" package which allows me to install a large bundle of xemacs packages at one time (about a 120 modes including ESS). I think R should have a similar bundle. It would be so much easier than hunting/downloading/installing. Martin encouraged me to send this suggestion to r-help. In addition, he put together a few comments relating to the previous times that this, or a similar suggestion, has been brought up here. Martin wrote: If you search for "install all CRAN packages" on http://maths.newcastle.edu.au/~rking/R/ (the URL which is quickly found from the [Search] sidebar of http://www.R-project.org/) You find things like Greg Warnes 'Makefile' http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/04/04/0723.html and http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/04/04/0616.html which is from Tony and has the following small function: installNewCRANPackages <- function() { ## (C) A.J. Rossini, 2002--2004 test2 <- packageStatus()$avail["Status"] install.packages(row.names(test2)[which(test2$Status=="not installed")]) } ---------- Rodney Sparapani Medical College of Wisconsin Sr. Biostatistician Patient Care & Outcomes Research rsparapa at mcw.edu http://www.mcw.edu/pcor Was 'Name That Tune' rigged? WWLD -- What Would Lombardi Do
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