[Rd] Porting R example datasets to GNU Octave

[Andrew Janke]

Hi, R Developers,

I'm interested in porting the R example datasets package to GNU Octave
and Matlab. Would you have objections to my doing so?

This would involve transforming the example data and metadata into a
format that Octave understands, and porting all of the datasets' Example
code pieces to Octave M-code. (This would require no work on your part;
it'd be my project.)

I think this would be a benefit to the scientific programming community.
In addition to helping Octave users, having code for identical example
data sets in both languages would serve as a Rosetta Stone for not only
users moving from R to Octave, but for users coming from Octave or
Matlab to R.

Since R's datasets package is GPL, I think I'd be within my rights to
just do this. But I wanted to ask first, to make sure I didn't ruffle
any feathers. I would include documentation indicating that R is the
original source (well, intermediate source) for these datasets, and have
links pointing back to R's documentation.

Cheers,
Andrew Janke

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[Rd] Incorrect date range in austres example dataset?

[Andrew Janke]

Hi, R developers,

It seems there might be an issue with the "austres" example dataset in
the "datasets" package. The description in austres.Rd says it's
"measured quarterly from March 1971 to March 1994". But there are only
89 observations in the data as defined in the source code. By my count,
that only brings you up to about March 1993. Is there an issue with the
data transcription, or the Description?

I'm looking at the source code from the R 3.6.0 source distribution.

Cheers,
Andrew Janke

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Re: [Rd] Porting R example datasets to GNU Octave

[Andrew Janke]

On 5/6/19 7:47 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
>
> On 5 May 2019 at 10:47, Andrew Janke wrote:
> | I'm interested in porting the R example datasets package to GNU Octave
> | and Matlab. Would you have objections to my doing so?
>
> You don't even have to ask...
>
> [...]
>
> | Since R's datasets package is GPL, I think I'd be within my rights to
> | just do this. But I wanted to ask first, to make sure I didn't ruffle
> | any feathers. I would include documentation indicating that R is the
> | original source (well, intermediate source) for these datasets, and have
> | links pointing back to R's documentation.
>
> That is the right way to do that. Respect both copyright (citing and
> referencing source) and licensing (by picking a license compatible
> with GPL 2
> or later; many of us just prefer to stick to GPL which Octave uses too).
>
> Dirk, in no way speaking for R Core but just handing out his $0.02

Thanks Dirk!

I've ported many of the datasets over to Octave code in my "Tablicious"
project.

To preserve credit, I've:
- propagated the "Copyright (C) 1995-2007 R Core Team" copyright
statement to the copyright headers in all the individual files for the
Octave code, since GNU Octave does per-file copyright headers
- added a "This is based on the  dataset from R's datasets
package" comment to each individual dataset source file
- added a section to the user manual mentioning that they came from R:
https://apjanke.github.io/octave-tablicious/doc/tablicious.html#Data-Sets-from-R

My project is GPL3+, so it's license compatible.

If you're curious to see how it turned out, the source is at
https://github.com/apjanke/octave-tablicious under
https://github.com/apjanke/octave-tablicious/tree/master/inst/%2Boctave/%2Binternal/%2Bdatasets
and
https://github.com/apjanke/octave-tablicious/tree/master/inst/%2Boctave/%2Bexamples/%2Binternal/%2Bdatasets.

R seems to have an edge on Octave in terms of plotting capabilities, so
many of the code examples in my port are just "TODO: Port this plot type
to Octave".

Cheers,
Andrew

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