Hi Ben. I agree with most of your points and questions, but just wanted to nitpick one little point, inline below:
On 09/11/2014, 3:26 PM, Ben Bolker wrote: > Gábor Csárdi <csardi.gabor <at> gmail.com> writes: > >> >> Hi, >> >> I think much of this is simply impossible to do. CRAN packages are >> written and maintained by thousands of people, how are you planning to >> convince them to reorganize their packages? Or even just rename them? >> This obviously won't happen. >> >> Btw. did you see 'CRAN Task Views'? That is one organizations of >> packages into topics. >> >> Personally, I don't think organization is the solution here. It is too >> costly (i.e. too much work) to maintain, impossible to enforce. I >> think, however, that a good search engine would definitely help. >> >> FWIW there is a simple search engine here: http://metacran.github.io/search/ >> This ranks packages according to the number of reverse dependencies >> (among other things), i.e. packages more often used by other packages >> will be higher up in the list. >> >> Ranking them according to downloads is also possible, but AFAIK only >> one CRAN mirror gives out statistics about downloads, so you don't >> really have the complete numbers there. >> >> Disclaimer: I built the search engine above. There are obviously other >> alternatives as well, e.g. http://rdocumentation.org, and >> http://mran.revolutionanalytics.com/packages/ are the two I know. >> >> Gabor > > A few more thoughts: > > * similar topics have been discussed _many_ times over the years on > the R mailing lists (sorry, I can't point you to any specific > threads). So far the R core/CRAN team have not indicated any interest "team" should be plural here. Though there is overlap in membership, CRAN is a separate entity from the R Core team. Duncan Murdoch > in making changes in the directions you suggest, so it's up to > the community to implement the things it would like to see. There's > nothing stopping you from mirroring CRAN packages in any way you'd > like (e.g. see Revolution R's 'MRAN': http://mran.revolutionanalytics.com/ , > which among other things allows you to sort packages by task view). > > In addition to the Task Views pointed out by Gabor (you may enjoy > this version: http://www.maths.lancs.ac.uk/~rowlings/R/TaskViews/ ), > there have been a variety of individual/community attempts to provide > more package information: > > * CRANberries http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/cranberries/ gives a feed > about package changes > * CRANtastic http://crantastic.org/ attempted to set up a community > site for package rating/voting (never got a lot of traction though). > * download information _is_ available, unofficially, from some > mirrors other than the RStudio mirror: see > http://www.rpubs.com/bbolker/3750 > > Questions: > > * how would you propose to enforce package naming? (One of the > great things about packaging code R is the relatively *low* > barriers to entry ... but that has obvious disadvantages ...) > * who's going to enforce and curate the metadata? > * who's going to decide on the criteria for CRAN package removal > (i.e. how to determine quality, or how to decide on a threshold > for removal?) There's some filtering based on packages failing > their automated checks and being archived as R advances ... > >> On Sun, Nov 9, 2014 at 11:24 AM, Steven Sagaert >> <steven.sagaert <at> gmail.com> wrote: >>> Hi, > >>> I’ve been using R on and off for a couple of years. I think R is >> pretty great but one thing I’d like to see improved is the way >> packages are organised. Instead of CRAN being a long list of >> packages having a short & usually unintelligible name I ‘d like to >> see packages organised in a hierarchical way with that path acting >> as a hierarchical namespace just like you have in many other >> languages like Java, C#,Scala,… The names of the (sub)packages >> should also be clear and unambiguous & packages should be organised >> according to their functionality and not just for example be code >> for a whole book thrown together and given a cryptic name. > >> Next to that it would be nice to have extra metadata in the >> packages to allow for another more loose flat multi-class >> class-action like in tagging blog systems & other metadata to allow >> for for automatically generating something like task views. > >>> Due to the large number of packages it’s hard to see the forest >> from the trees so a recommendation system for CRAN based on >> popularity (download statistics) , ratings & other data like related >> packages from package metadata would be most welcome. > > >> Finally the number of packages in CRAN is exponentially growing but >> there is also a large partial overlap in functionality between >> packages & so many packages make it hard to find what you are >> looking for. So maybe there less is more and there should be a >> system of removing hardly used/low quality packages on a regular >> basis. > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
