[Rd] Re: [R] Unbundling gregmisc (was: loading gap package)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 4 May 2005, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

> Warnes, Gregory R wrote:
>> Let me redirect the topic a bit.  I've been considering unbundling 
>> gregmisc.

So let's move to R-devel.

>> The pro would be that people would find the component packages (i.e. gdata)
>> more easily.  The con is that the packages have a number of
>> interdependencies, so you pretty much will need to get most of them anyway.
>> 
>> As the latest gregmisc bundle contains a gregmisc package that is just a
>> stub that depends on and loads the individual packages, there would still 
>> be
>> a gregmisc object.
>> 
>> Comments?
>
> Currently R can follow dependencies when you install a package from CRAN (and 
> this is the default in Windows, not sure about other platforms), so I'd say 
> this would be a good thing to do.  I don't know your revision history on the 
> components, but I'd guess some change more often than others, so there'll be 
> no need to update all of them every time one of them changes.

It has been possible on Unix and Windows for a while, but it seems is not 
yet implemented on MacOS X (although I submitted the code needed). 
However, it is only the default on the Windows GUI and not for any 
command-line version of install.packages().  People have from time to time 
suggested changing the default, but the dependency tree can get rather 
large and some people do have slow and expensive connections.

I think a bundle is still a better idea.  Apart from on MacOS X we need 
some education about how to use the power of *.packages (and we need to 
get the MacOS versions in place).  For example, bundle components show up 
with the dialog-based installation lists.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595