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Where is gdata?

2 messages · Gabor Grothendieck, Gavin Simpson

Gabor Grothendieck
#
On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 6:44 AM, Stephen Liu <satimis at yahoo.com> wrote:
In the end it appears that there was no problem in accessing the gdata
package or any of its components and that the poster's problem stemmed
from issuing this series of commands:

library(AER)
data()

at which point the poster saw the names of AER data files listed and
assumed that the data() command showed the data set names of the last
loaded library.  Based on this assumption when he issued this series
of commands:

library(gdata)
data()

and saw AER listed again he thought that gdata had not been loaded.
In fact the data() command lists the names of the data sets of *all*
installed packages, and not just the last loaded one, so if AER is the
alphabetically first package that is installed it will always appear
first.  Thus to view gdata's data set names in this list one would
have to scroll down to view the names off the screen.

Things which confused the issue further were that the poster was using
a virtual machine to run R, which might have caused problems in
determining where the library was located but in fact did not, and one
responder somehow assumed that the question related to read.xls (a
function in gdata) and its perl dependency but as indicated the
problem actually had nothing specifically to do with gdata at all much
less read.xls or perl.
Gavin Simpson
#
On Wed, 2010-12-01 at 07:32 -0500, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
<snip />
Indeed. And I informed Mr Liu of *this* very point in a separate thread
(How to remove a package?) [1] where he also had failed to look at what
data() was actually outputting.

So we have two long, tedious threads both arising because Mr Liu i)
keeps making assumptions about what is going on rather than bothering to
find out what really is going on, and ii) failed to (or didn't bother
to) or did not comprehend the various ?data or ?library help pages.

This is why people get annoyed with the way certain members of this list
abuse it by resorting to a 'send-email-first' approach to problem
solving.

Mr Liu - please note the above (you seem to have totally disregarded
what I wrote in the previous thread!) and in future use the list
responsibly. People here give of their time freely and you should not
abuse that generosity. The inconvenience of having to delete 30+ emails
I consider an abuse of this list - for those who might argue that I
could just delete Mr Liu's emails if I was not interested in them or his
problems.

Finally - thank you Gabor for persevering with Mr Liu to the extent that
his problem has been solved.

Gavin

[1]
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.r.general/212725/match=simpson