Standards for delivery of GPL software in CRAN packages
On Mon, 2011-06-27 at 11:14 -0400, Galkowski, Jan wrote:
Fine. Attached. It's "waved". All it has is *.Rd files. Apparently the functions are collected in "functionINIT.R". But "00Index" and "DESCRIPTION" are not helpful. - j
The Rd files are the help or manual "pages" for the functions defined in the package. In this particular case, the package author has decided to put all the R code for their package into a single R source file - functionINIT.R. The other two files are R-specific files, the latter of which is used to describe the package; which, incidentally, points you to a peer-reviewed paper that the package is support for. I don't recall the GPL mentioning anything requiring that the source code be "helpful". The authors have most certainly fulfilled their requirements under GPL, as has CRAN in distributing the package sources. Or am I being obtuse and completely missing your point? G
-----Original Message----- From: b.rowlingson at googlemail.com [mailto:b.rowlingson at googlemail.com] On Behalf Of Barry Rowlingson Sent: Monday, June 27, 2011 10:18 AM To: Galkowski, Jan Cc: r-help at r-project.org Subject: Re: [R] Standards for delivery of GPL software in CRAN packages On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 1:24 PM, Galkowski, Jan <jgalkows at akamai.com> wrote:
I wondered if there were standard practices in CRAN for delivery of R source implementing functions in R packages. I has encountered a couple of packages where the gzipped version of source contains very little, primarily the Help files describing the functions in the package. In some cases I can find the source as the value of the function name. Given that these packages are released as GPL, oughtn't the unoptimized source be freely available, hopefully with comments? Am I missing something? Is there a central place other than mirrors where such source is retained? Sourceforge?
The 'package source' link on CRAN should point you to a tar.gz file that contains the source code. For example, for splancs off the heanet mirror it is: http://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/splancs_2.01-27.tar.gz .tar.gz files from those links should have full R, C and Fortran source code. I think we need counter-examples... Barry
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