R "sumo" package suggestion

-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch 
[mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Achim Zeileis
Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2004 10:21 PM
To: Liaw, Andy
Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch; rsparapa at post.its.mcw.edu
Subject: Re: [R] 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