Hello, I feel a brief follow up to my post a few days ago is in order. Thanks to Renaud Lancelot's truly excelent step by step guide I solved my own difficulties in building R packages for personal use. A short while after he sent me his document the reply was -"Voil?! Je l'ai fonctionnant (enfin!). C'est facile!" My French is obviously quite hopeless which is a tribute to the clarity of his explanation! However I am still receiving a suprising number of off list comments to the effect that package building is much more trouble than it is worth. I'm now convinced that it's not, thanks to Renaud's very clear document. The problem seems to lie in the fact that the "official" documentation for package construction is aimed at those providing serious "R extensions" for publication on CRAN. That's fine, but packages are also very useful for personal use as a neat way of keeping your own stuff organised and documented. At the moment the overhead (time) for personal package construction superficially looks much higher than it need be, especially for users of R under Windows. Dare I say it, but all the saintly souls who dedicate their lives to R sometimes overlook lay users who have a(nother) life! Is anyone working on a simple way of building packages, or explaining how to build packages? They would find a larger user base than they might suspect. Duncan Golicher
Dr Duncan Golicher Ecologia y Sistematica Terrestre Conservaci?n de la Biodiversidad El Colegio de la Frontera Sur San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico Tel. 967 1883 ext 1310 Celular 044 9671041021 dgoliche at sclc.ecosur.mx