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The hidden costs of GPL software?

9 messages · Cliff Lunneborg, Duncan Murdoch, John Fox +6 more

Original
Cliff Lunneborg
# 
Could I voice my support for the sixth point raised by John Fox? Many
users would find such a development to be enormously useful.


"  (6) As has been pointed out, e.g., by Duncan Murdoch, solving the
function-locating problem is best done by a method or methods that
automatically accommodate the growing and changing set of contributed
packages on CRAN.  Why not, as previously has been proposed, replace the
current static (and, in my view, not very useful) set of keywords in R
documentation with the requirement that package authors supply their own
keywords for each documented object? I believe that this is the intent
of
the concept entries in Rd files, but their use certainly is not required
or
even actively encouraged. (They're just mentioned in passing in the
Writing
R Extensions manual.)"


**********************************************************
Cliff Lunneborg, Professor Emeritus, Statistics &
Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle
cliff at ms.washington.edu
2 days later
Duncan Murdoch
# 
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 13:59:23 -0800, "Cliff Lunneborg"
<cliff at ms.washington.edu> quoted John Fox:
That would not be easy and won't happen quickly.  There are some
problems:

 - The base packages mostly don't use  \concept. (E.g. base has 365
man pages, only about 15 of them use it).  Adding it to each file is a
fairly time-consuming task.

- Before we started, we'd need to agree as to what they are for.
Right now, I think they are mainly used when the name of a concept
doesn't match the name of the function that implements it, e.g.
"modulo", "remainder", "promise", "argmin", "assertion".  The need for
this usage is pretty rare.  If they were used for everything, what
would they contain?

 - Keywording in a useful way is hard.  There are spelling issues
(e.g. optimise versus optimize); our fuzzy matching helps with those.
But there are also multiple names for the same thing, and multiple
meanings for the same name.

Duncan Murdoch
John Fox
# 
Dear Duncan,

I don't think that there is an automatic, nearly costless way of providing
an effective solution to locating R resources. The problem seems to me to be
analogous to indexing a book. There's an excellent description of what that
process *should* look like in the Chicago Manual of Style, and it's a lot of
work. In my experience, most book indexes are quite poor, and automatically
generated indexes, while not useless, are even worse, since one should index
concepts, not words. The ideal indexer is therefore the author of the book.

I guess that the question boils down to how important is it to provide an
analogue of a good index to R? As I said in a previous message, I believe
that the current search facilities work pretty well -- about as well as one
could expect of an automatic approach. I don't believe that there's an
effective centralized solution, so doing something more ambitious than is
currently available implies farming out the process to package authors. Of
course, there's no guarantee that all package authors will be diligent
indexers. 

Regards,
 John

--------------------------------
John Fox
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario
Canada L8S 4M4
905-525-9140x23604
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox 
--------------------------------
Roger Koenker
# 
Having just finished an index I would like to second John's comments.
Even as an author, it is  difficult to achieve some degree of
completeness and consistency.

Of course, maybe a real whizz at clustering could assemble something
very useful quite easily.  All of us who have had the frustration of 
searching
for a forgotten function would be grateful.


url:	www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger        	Roger Koenker
email	rkoenker at uiuc.edu			Department of Economics
vox: 	217-333-4558				University of Illinois
fax:   	217-244-6678				Champaign, IL 61820
On Nov 23, 2004, at 7:48 AM, John Fox wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Jari Oksanen
    

    

      
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On Tue, 2004-11-23 at 17:40, roger koenker wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
You mean SOM?

  
    

      
      
    

  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Patrick Burns
    

    

      
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I think John has exactly the right image -- index to a book --
but I disagree with his conclusions.

I read somewhere that an index should not be done by the
author.  It was probably written by someone who was bored
of indexing, but the logic was precisely because indices should
be about concepts.  The author of a package will have one
concept for a function but not all of the concepts that come
from various fields of study.  I suspect that no one outside of
finance would think to index "sd" with "volatility" for (a not very
good) example.

There could be an index builder that accepts a search phrase and
the function or package that is the successful answer to the search.
If this were open, then R users could contribute to the index who
don't feel qualified to submit code. It could also help diffuse the
frustration of taking too long to find a function by allowing a way
to insure that the exact same thing doesn't happen to others.

Amazon has a function that says those who bought "The Chicago
Manual of Style" also bought Strunk and White.  In the same way,
the R index could provide a list of terms that overlap the given
search term.  For example if we search for "goodness of fit", then
"hypothesis test" might be one of the related terms that pops up.

No, I'm not volunteering to build the system.

Patrick Burns

Burns Statistics
patrick at burns-stat.com
+44 (0)20 8525 0696
http://www.burns-stat.com
(home of S Poetry and "A Guide for the Unwilling S User")

        
John Fox wrote:

        

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Philippe GROSJEAN
    

    

      
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Patrick Burns wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
Too bad! ;-)

Indeed, the idea to index tens of thousands of functions could not be
appealing to many of us! Why not to consider to test such ideas at the
package level? I mean, building a system that points out the packages of
interest (those in CRAN, of course), given a search phrase would be a more
resonable work. Then, looking at online help of that particular package
would be the small additional effort required by the user. The problem here
is with heterogeneous packages (the XXXXmisc, and the like)...

And... No I'm not volunteering to build the system either.

Best,

Philippe Grosjean

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Mike Prager
    

    

      
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At 11/23/2004 11:45 AM Tuesday, Patrick Burns wrote:

        

            

      
      
      
    

        
Nor am I, but as one of those users, I would very gladly contribute to it.

  
    

      
      
    

  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      David Forrest
    

    

      
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On Tue, 23 Nov 2004, Philippe Grosjean wrote:

        

            

      
      
      
    

        
This mail archive works well if the questions are well posed and answered:

help.search.archive<-function(string){
   RURL="http://www.google.com/u/newcastlemaths"
   RSearchURL=paste(RURL,"?q=",string,sep='')
   browseURL(RSearchURL)
   return(invisible(0))
 }
help.search.google<-function(string){
   RURL="http://www.google.com/search"
   RSearchURL=paste(RURL,"?sitesearch=r-project.org&q=",string,sep='')
   browseURL(RSearchURL)
   return(invisible(0))
 }

help.search.archive('volatility') # may soon show Dr. Harrell's example
help.search.google('volatility') # may show enough

Is there package data that is not searchable through the google search?

Dave