[Rd] Idea: Testimonials

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "Romain" == Romain Francois <rfrancois at mango-solutions.com>
>>>>>     on Fri, 27 Oct 2006 20:33:06 +0100 writes:

    Romain> Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
    >> It occurred to me that we could have an optional file
    >> called TESTIMONIALS that comes with each package which
    >> could be a list of short testimonials from users
    >> indicating success with that package and possibly a few
    >> details of the successful application, e.g. it was used
    >> to analyse xyz data.
    >> 
    >> Users would be encouraged to send in testimonials.
    >> 
    >> This would give new users an immediate idea of what
    >> others have done with any given package.
    >> 
    >> It would be up to the authors and maintainer to solicit
    >> the testimonials.  The author and maintainer could list
    >> their own applications in that file too if they wished.
    >> 
    >> Another possibility is to place the testimonials in the
    >> vignette if there is one.
    >> 
    Romain> Hi,

    Romain> Could that kind of things go to the wiki
    Romain> http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=packages:packages

Yes, I think it could, and even think it should.
For the time being the 'packages' section of the RWiki (URL
above) should be used much more in my view.

Here is ``my wish'' :

Ideally, for all CRAN (or Bioconductor or Omegahat) package
that's not there already,
there would be either
1) a nightly CRON job that built a web page template automatically,
   just from analyzing <CRAN>/src/packages/ content
2) a "button" that user could press which creates a web page
   template for package

These templates would already have a few pieces of information,
including a link to CRAN / BioC / ... for the package source
(and reference PDF).

--> and now the topic has really diverted and should probably be
continued on the R-SIG-Wiki mailing list.

Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich