1. I saw a reference to the Fullerton Library in one of the r-help
messages recently. What and where is it?
I have no idea! A quick grep in library/base/help didn't turn up
anything.
2. Has there been developed a function like sas.get for R or can
the one found at statlib in the directory for S be used?
No development. I don't know; I have never needed to do the translation
but I imagine/assume that once the format of the sas files is known
it would be easy enough to write the translator and I would start
with the one at statlib.
5. Is there any work being done on GUI front ends like the dialog
functions found in Splus?
None that I am aware of.
6. I learned that MathSoft intends to make its S code inaccessible for
use in R. Is that true, how can that be achieved, and what are the
implications of it in the development and use of R?
That's news to me (but not surprising news). I have no idea how
they intend to do it. Certainly they have gotten alot of mileage out
of contributions by others (Terry Thernau's survival package for
example) that needs to be open to be developed and used (at least
initially). I imagine that too strong a move towards locking things
up as internal code will push many academics/professionals away from
it as a development platform. In my opinion this would be a huge
mistake. R isn't really a competitor. R has been dubbed part of
GNU by RMS himself.
7. How many developers are there that regularly contribute to the
development of R?
I count 7 on the core development team. F. Leisch, K. Hornik
(TU Wien, Austria), Martin Maechler (ETHZ, Zurich, Switzerland),
Peter Dalgaard ( University of Copenhagen), Ross Ihaka and myself
(U. of Auckland, New Zealand), Thomas Lumley, (U of Washington,
Dept of Biostats).
We also get a lot of help from:
Luke Tierney, U of Minnesotta,
Heinrich Schwarte, Essen, Germany
Doug Bates, U of Wisconsin
Plus a host of others.
Whenever one starts making lists there are those that are
inevitably left off; my apologies to you all.
8. What is R's development platform?
I'm not sure what you mean. Basically we do our primary development
on Unix (SunOS at work and Ross uses FreeBSD at home). We then do
our ports to Macintosh and Windows using what have become fairly
antiquated machines.
The compilation of R on my Linux box was easy. It was troublesome, at
first, to compile it on a Solaris2.5 platform. Once I defined the
environmental variable: OPENWINHOME=/usr/openwin, the compilation
proceeded without a problem. I wish compilations of other software
were so nice.
9. What is the procedure for the submission of software for R?
Are unsolicited submissions or developed utilities not found on
the "TO DO" list welcomed?
Kurt and Fritz maintain the CRAN archive of software libraries that
have been made to run under R.
http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/R/CRAN/
If you have something that works then there are some guidelines about
how to wrap it up and it becomes part of the archive.
R is mirrored from Auckland at a variety of sites around the world.
People should pick it up from the site nearest them (not from us,
we have to pay real money for every copy that goes out; yes I know
it sounds like a silly system but they have yet to let me run the
place)
There are several mailing lists about R. The most useful is
r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch (which you posted to anyway).
Bug fixes can be posted there. People who post several good
bug fixes will soon find themselves drawn into a more active role.
robert
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