[ESS] Integration of pandoc using polymode+knitr

[Ista Zahn]

Well now I am almost certain to take us far off topic for this list...

On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 4:33 PM, Yihui Xie <xie at yihui.name> wrote:
> Right -- rmarkdown is not a CRAN package _yet_, but no, it is not tied
> to the RStudio company in the sense of a software package.

All fine and good as far as I'm concerned. It is common for packages
to spend some time on github or such before being "ready" for CRAN
prime-time.

 As you can
> see, it is open source (GPL-3): https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown I
> do not think there is anything wrong for a company to write open
> source software packages just because it is a company instead of a
> university or a non-profit organization. There are great open source
> products from both *.com and *.org parties. I'm not sure why you are
> so concerned about the "label", or what your concerns really are, and
> we (==RStudio) will truly appreciate it if you tell us what we did
> wrong.

Nothing in my opinion, and I'm curious to hear from Martin or others.
I like the RStudio IDE (though not nearly as much as I like Emacs +
ESS + Org-mode), and I hope it succeeds as a company and continues to
develop useful tools for the R community.

Open source should not stop people from being rich, should it?
> (although I'm not rich...)

Not in principle, but in practice I think it's often difficult. But
here is where I do get a bit nervous: What is RStudio's business
model? How exactly will they get rich? Of course there are the
training services (can't imagine that this keeps the lights on light
alone pays salaries) and shiny hosting (which isn't out of beta yet).
So how do you plan to get rich? My fear is that at some point Rstudio
decides to cash in and start charging for all of the goodies we
currently get for free. I hope shiny hosting makes enough money to
support the company, to I fear that the business model may be
something akin to Facebook in the early days: get them all hooked on
free stuff, then when everyone is dependent on you hit them with the
adds (or fees or whatever).

>

> The rmarkdown and related products are still under development.
> Eventually rmarkdown will be a CRAN package.

Yes, all fine and good, I don't see anything unusual here.

Best,
Ista

I see your point about
> the non-R portion of source code (it is big... or is 8.5Mb really
> big?), but I guess that misses the goal. The goal is not to write more
> R (and only R) code in a package, but to have better-looking output
> with less effort in the low-level tuning of Pandoc parameters. There
> are plenty of R packages on CRAN that do not primarily contain R code,
> right? (e.g. packages for datasets, packages using C++, and why should
> packages containing more JavaScript code be second-class citizens? :)
>
> BTW, I'm happy to continue the discussion in private if this is
> considered off-topic.
>
> Regards,
> Yihui
> --
> Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
> Web: http://yihui.name
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 12:54 PM, Martin Maechler
> <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
>>>>>>> Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
>>>>>>>     on Thu, 27 Mar 2014 01:03:15 -0500 writes:
>>
>>     > Hi Mathieu,
>>     > Sorry for the late reply. The rmarkdown package has made a lot of
>>     > efforts in generating attractive output by default, including HTML and
>>     > PDF output, etc. For example, HTML output uses Bootstrap 3 and you can
>>     > easily switch themes.
>>
>> Well, rmarkdown is not a CRAN package... and it seems is really
>> tied to the Rstudio company.
>> It looks to me one way to have people flock to using RStudio everywhere..
>>
>>     > I know it may be a very bad idea to suggest the RStudio IDE in the ESS
>>     > mailing list,
>>
>> yes...  ;-)
>>
>>     > but I still recommend you to try it out. It is super
>>     > easy to go from an R Markdown document to other output formats. You do
>>     > not have to remember the Pandoc arguments -- there is a configuration
>>     > wizard and a little document setting button. Well, I know GUI's
>>     > probably do not make sense here...
>>
>>     > Regards,
>>     > Yihui
>>     > --
>>     > Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
>>     > Web: http://yihui.name
>>
>>
>>     > On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 9:19 PM, Mathieu Basille
>>     > <basille.web at ase-research.org> wrote:
>>     >> Dear Yihui,
>>     >>
>>     >> Le 03/11/2014 10:04 PM, Yihui Xie a écrit :
>>     >>
>>     >>> I'm glad that your problem was solved. Just as Ahmadou
>>     >>> mentioned, we
>>     >>> are heading towards rmarkdown (http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com),
>> 'we' ==?== Rstudio employees, or ??
>> I'm really getting a bit concerned here.
>> I liked Rstudio when it was *.org, and have been getting
>> increasingly nervous, now that it has been *.com ...
>>
>> As mentioned above, why should we suddenly have to work with a non-CRAN package?
>> Also, is 'rmarkdown' (as a standard) something to be defined outside of the
>> Rstudio web site any time soon?
>> I've started using *.Rmd (and Rstudio to some extent) in
>> teaching, but I'm really having concerns more and more.
>>
>>     >>>  which is a nice alternative to knitr::pandoc().
>>
>> Then, knitr is a CRAN package with GPL licence,
>> so we can rely that it will continue to be available into the future.
>> (Ok, I see that rmarkdown also has a GPL licence.. and it is on
>>  github, just not on CRAN, and it contains 8.5 MB of source code,
>>  most of which is java script ... ... )
>>
>>     >> would be fairly easy to use any other function, such as rmarkdown::render
>>     >> instead of knitr::pandoc. As for me, as I already use knitr (obviously) to
>>     >> knit, and pandoc is also installed on my system, it makes more sense to use
>>     >> what's available!
>>
>> and what is simple and modular..  The rmarkdown with all its new
>> bells and whistle and huge amounts of non-R source code, has its
>> advantages but also its drawbacks in my view.
>>
>> Martin
>>
>>     >> Or maybe I'm missing the obvious: is there a strong
>>     >> argument in favor of rmarkdown::render instead of knitr::pandoc?
>>     >>
>>     >> Mathieu.
>>
>
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