For what it's worth, I'd be inclined to interpreting CRAN's response
*very* literally, i.e. your Description field is not descriptive enough.
According to what I can see in the Github repo, you only have
"Datasets used in the book Categorical Data Analysis by Agresti but not
printed in the book."
Which is not much more than what the Title field says. One glaring
omission (IMO) from the Description field is any mention of Agresti's
website, where the data comes from.
In contrast, looking at the "woolridge" package, I can see from the
Description field that it contains 111 datasets (well, that's in the Title
field), it's about econometrics, and the purpose of the package is to make
it easier for students to work with these datasets.
Max Turgeon
Assistant Professor
Department of Statistics
Department of Computer Science
University of Manitoba
maxturgeon.ca
------------------------------
*From:* R-package-devel <r-package-devel-bounces at r-project.org> on behalf
of Charles Geyer <charlie at stat.umn.edu>
*Sent:* June 28, 2020 11:38 AM
*To:* Neal Fultz
*Cc:* R Package Development
*Subject:* Re: [R-pkg-devel] package CatDataAnalysis
********************************************************
Caution: This message was sent from outside the University of Manitoba.
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Actually the wooldridge package does not seem to satisfy any of the
specific requests CRAN asked me for. I have checked several other CRAN
packages for textbooks and they don't seem to satisfy those requirements
either. So this seems to be a new idea from CRAN.
On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 11:32 AM Neal Fultz <nfultz at gmail.com> wrote:
I'm not sure exactly what cran is asking for, but the wooldridge
package is a good example of a text book data set package, so maybe
you can use the same format they did.
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/wooldridge/index.html
Best,
Neal
On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 9:08 AM Charles Geyer <charlie at stat.umn.edu>
wrote:
I have a package that has the datasets for Categorical Data Analysis by
Agresti that do not appear in the book. The whole package is a github
data
are much simpler to use with this package than trying to get the data
Agresti's web page (foo.R has 277 lines of code).
When I submitted the package to CRAN, I got the following response.
The Description field of the DESCRIPTION file is intended to be a
paragraph) description of what the package does and why it may be
useful. Please elaborate. Tell the users what the datasets are about
what they contain so they can use them even when they haven't read
Please fix and resubmit, and document what was changed in the
In an alternate universe without copyright law this seems a reasonable
request. In this universe it seems to be asking for trouble. I know
fair use, but I am not a lawyer and do not want to walk the borderline
between fair use and copyright violation.
The package as it is seems OK because it comes from the author's public
site and these data were never in the book.
Please note that I made Alan Agresti (with his acquiescence) the author
the package because it is his book and his data, but I (or rather
did all the work.
I replied to cran.r-project.org, but that was apparently sent to
This book is IMHO the authoritative textbook on the subject. Amazon
rank agrees. The book is used for many courses. So this package would
very helpful as is to many students and teachers.
So what to do? Is there any way to get this package on CRAN?
--
Charles Geyer
Professor, School of Statistics
Resident Fellow, Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science
University of Minnesota
charlie at stat.umn.edu
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