I think Achim suggestion is more realistic: it does not
installation of all packages, but just a restricted list of packages
available on CRAN about a specific topic.
An easy way to get this result is to propose separate lists of
packages. It
means separate lists than
http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/PACKAGES.html (and
the
Windows packages binaries). I don't see the problem to
lists
that could be called 'SpatialStats.html' (in packages
sources)/'SpatialStats' (in Windows binaries)... and the same for
'MachineLearning', 'Biostats', etc...
Then, of course the various functions that install packages
adapted to use these lists. It does not look like an unsurmontable
task.
Of course, if this is not done yet by the R Core Team, I
there
must be difficulties that I don't see. It is obvious that,
need a
list maintainer for each topic, or we have to propose keywords for
packages
(similar to the keywords for functions) that will be used to
automatically
generate those separate lists.
An alternative that can currently be used for groups of users in an
institution is to maintain a local copy of R packages
contains only the packages of interest for this group. I do
students. Under Windows, in the new R 2.0.1 beta, there is
entry
in packages -> Set CRAN mirror... (in my version it does
looking for a missing .\doc\CRAN_mirrors.csv file), but I
figure
out how it works and how I could append my own repository
to
ease installation of a restricted list of R packages by my
This is
only for Windows, but a similar approach can also be used on other
platforms
with a little bit of coding.
Best,
Philippe
..............................................<??}))><........
) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( ( Prof. Philippe Grosjean
) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( ( Numerical Ecology of Aquatic Systems
) ) ) ) ) Mons-Hainaut University, Pentagone
( ( ( ( ( Academie Universitaire Wallonie-Bruxelles
) ) ) ) ) 6, av du Champ de Mars, 7000 Mons, Belgium
( ( ( ( (
) ) ) ) ) phone: + 32.65.37.34.97, fax: + 32.65.37.33.12
( ( ( ( ( email: Philippe.Grosjean at umh.ac.be
) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( ( web: http://www.umh.ac.be/~econum
) ) ) ) )
..............................................................
-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch
[mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of
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
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
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
fall in a particular category (e.g., `spatial statistics').
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
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
bundle of xemacs packages at one time (about a 120 modes
ESS). I think R should have a similar bundle. It would
easier than hunting/downloading/installing. Martin
send this suggestion to r-help. In addition, he put