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

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Duncan Murdoch wrote:

> Of course, with disk sizes as they are now, it's not unreasonable to
> install all of the contributed CRAN packages on a PC.  Then
> help.search() *will* do searches through them all.

Some of them are very specialized, and some of them have non-CRAN
dependencies. I've done a few "load everything from CRAN" operations on
my Linux boxes, only to overflow the warnings list with missing Linux
software. And, as an example, I have zero use for molecular biology
packages.

Dirk Eddelbuettel has done a lot of work integrating the CRAN and other
R package collections with the Debian GNU/Linux package management
system. This rather neatly solves the non-CRAN dependency problems, at
least for Debian.

Other people have done similar things for Perl packages and Common Lisp
packages, both in Debian and in Gentoo's Portage package management
system. CRAN could easily be integrated into Portage, but nobody has
stepped forward to volunteer. Maybe when I retire ... :)

And where does this leave Windows users? There's nothing like Debian or
Portage for them; CRAN would have to build it from scratch.