[Rd] Re: [R] A long digression on packages

[Peter Dalgaard]

Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> writes:

> Jim raises good points, as do the replies. On the topic of '500+ and
> growing', let me add my pet peeve: It is mighty impossible to know /what/
> changed /when/ in CRANland.
> 
> Being Debian maintainer for a fair number of packages, I owe users of those
> packages timely updates. But the best I can do is to look at the
> timestamp-sorted source directory http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/?M=D
> That is tedious, as well as error-prone.  Moreover, as an R user, I'd like to
> know what is being added and, and what is being changed. There is no way to
> know right now.
> 
> I would not be hard to write a little monitoring script that looks at the
> directory (and keeps tab in a Rdata structure, or SQLite db, or ...) and
> spits out either emails, or maybe rss-feed updates, of either or both of 'new
> packages' or 'new versions'.  If additionally we would enforce (err let's
> start with encourage) a standardised changelog (say $SRC/inst/CHANGES or
> $SRC/inst/ChangeLog) then that could get parsed too.  I had meant to play
> with some code for this for a while now but it just hasn't happened.
> Whining on a list is easier than writing code, unfortunately...
> 
> Comments?

You might want to have a closer look at the way recommended packages
are handled by an R distribution build, using rsync, links,
timestamps, and makefile rules. 

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
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