[Rd] package development

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 12/15/2008 10:31 AM, Kevin R. Coombes wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Terry Therneau's question about package development reminded me of a 
> different issue. I maintain several packages along with a repository for 
> them at "http://bioinformatics.mdanderson.org/OOMPA/". Several people 
> are working on adding features or testing the packages. So, I often want 
> to have both the latest official release and the currently testable 
> build of the package available in the repository. I tried putting both 
> versions in the same repository, but this leads to a problem for some of 
> the testers, who are not familiar with the intricacies of building 
> packages. (Thus, I cannot just tell them to get the source tarball and 
> compile it; they will have no clue as to what I am talking about. And 
> their Windows machines will not have the required tools installed in any 
> event.)
> 
> The underlying problem is that when you run the command
>  >  install.packages(repos="http://bioinformatics.mdanderson.org/OOMPA")
> inside the R Windows GUI, the selection box that appears only lists the 
> name of the package, _not_ the version number. Thus, the testers cannot 
> tell which of two packages with the same name should be installed.
> 
> Is there any way around this problem other than to maintain two 
> different repositories?

available.packages() reports version numbers, e.g.

 
available.packages(contrib.url("http://bioinformatics.mdanderson.org/OOMPA"))

You'll need to write a user interface to make use of this.

Duncan Murdoch