[Rd] Wish list

[Thomas Lumley]

On Sun, 18 Jan 2004, Fernando Henrique Ferraz wrote:

> Frank E Harrell Jr writes:
> > Let me add to the wish list the creation of some mechanism to better track
> > improvements and bug fixes in packages, such as a change log link by each
> > package's area in CRAN, or easy access to CVS information from there.
> > When I report bugs (e.g., in read.xport in foreign [due somewhat to
> > problems inherent with SAS's format] or ace or avas in acepack) it would
> > be nice to see some announcement when the bugs are resolved, or to easily
> > track this.


A lot of wishlist suggestions need at least cooperation from R-core, who
may not agree that a change is desirable even if someone else were to
write the code. A  bug-tracking system for contributed packages is one of
the exceptions. There's nothing to stop some package developer(s) created
a bug tracking system and making accounts available to other people
(except the time, resources, security issues, etc).

Keeping track of changes is harder. The CVS commit logs for foreign and
survival are with the log for R itself on http://developer.r-project.org.
It's not even that hard to write R code to read the page and extract
entries relevant to that package.

For CRAN to list changes to other packages would require cooperation from
all the package developers. If the maintainer of acepack isn't
sufficiently together to reply to your messages, he probably won't be
keeping up with other aspects of change tracking.  Even trying to extract
a NEWS or Changelog file might not work -- eg for survival the Changelog
file is Terry Therneau's change log, not my log for changes to the R port.

	-thomas

Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle