On Reproducible Code
On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 11:50 AM, David L Carlson <dcarlson at tamu.edu> wrote:
We often refer requesters to the Posting Guide and chide them for not reading it. Recently I had occasion to re-read the Posting Guide which is for all R lists not just R-help. The word "reproducible" does not appear anywhere in the guide. The closest it comes is the following suggestion: "Sometimes it helps to provide a small example that someone can actually run." Recommendations to use the function dput() to provide sample data do not appear in the guide. The bottom of messages to R-help does contain the statement you've all seen, but I had assumed it summarized advice found elsewhere since first time posters may not see the message until after they have posted. "PLEASE do read the posting guide
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code." The Mailing Lists page describes R-help but refers only to the posting guide http://www.r-project.org/mail.html and does not include this advisory statement. The R-help Info Page also refers only to the posting guide https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help and does not include this advisory statement. I hesitate to sound too optimistic, but there might be some advantage in making the statement more prominent and adding a reproducible example using dput(). ---------------------------------------------- David L Carlson Associate Professor of Anthropology Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77843-4352 ______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
I agree that the posting guide is not ideal. On the other hand, the last line of every message to r-help does concisely list what is required.
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