Outdated links to the Bioconductor repos in R.app
Quoting Simon Urbanek <simon.urbanek at r-project.org>:
On May 23, 2006, at 10:31 PM, Herve Pages wrote:
I'm using R.app GUI 1.16-pre (3114) with R 2.3.0. The links defined in R.app for accessing the Bioconductor repositories need to be updated.
This has been fixed in 3161 (and of all the people you should know, actually ;)).
Simon, Point taken. In the future, I'll try to base my reports on the last Mac OS X GUI available here http://r.research.att.com/#GUI
but they should be (in this order): http://bioconductor.org/packages/bioc http://bioconductor.org/packages/data/annotation http://bioconductor.org/packages/data/experiment http://bioconductor.org/packages/omegahat http://bioconductor.org/packages/lindsey http://cran.fhcrc.org
Should CRAN be really on that list?
Well it depends what you are trying to achieve: if you want the GUI
to show the user the list of Bioconductor packages only, then you
don't need the 3 last repos.
But if you also want the user to be able to install from this list and
then to load the newly installed stuff, then you need 2 things:
1) provide a set of repos that is closed for the dependency relationship
2) provide the user with the option to have all the dependencies
installed in addition to the packages s/he selected
Since the GUI doesn't support 2), then I agree that we don't really
need the 3 last repos (omegahat, lindsey and CRAN)... But I'd rather
keep them anyway because:
- Some users might want to do things like:
install.packages('pkg', repos=getOption("BioC.Repos"), dep=TRUE)
The only way to guarantee that this will work for _any_ Bioconductor
package is to have all 5 repos returned by getOption("BioC.Repos")
- Things are consistent with the biocLite() function that we provide
for users of _all_ platforms
http://bioconductor.org/docs/install-howto.html
The inconvenient of this is that we end up with the GUI displaying a very
long list... but this is not really a problem because I don't think many
users actually browse the entire list: they'd rather use the search box
instead.
Lindsey was omitted intentionally, because the packages are constantly broken (0 of them compile on OS X to-date) and the maintainer refuses to fix them despite instructions how to do so. (His last response was that the users should fix it themselves...)
That's sad :-/
Also, we have started to use a more consistent spelling for the project ( it's never too late ;-) ): please help us by using "Bioconductor" instead of "BioConductor".
Oh, ok :). Are we allowed to use BioC or is it also Bioc? (The latter looks rather boring ;)).
Agreed :-), but OTOH, as Seth told me recently, "BioC" might suggest that we are using C instead of R. Anyway, let's stick to "BioC" for now... Thanks! H.