[Rd] package development

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 12/15/2008 10:58 AM, Kevin R. Coombes wrote:
> I knew that (but forgot to include it in my statement of the question). 
>   Thanks for pointing it out.
> 
> Is there any way to convince the selection box (or its developers) to 
> include the version information that is already available?

The selection box is adamant that it will only display one thing.

The developers would like to have a grid display component, and then 
would be happy to display more information about each package, but are 
unlikely to write one, due to competing priorities.  If you wanted to 
contribute one...

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> 	Kevin
> 
> 
> Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>> 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