[Rd] Packages for R-CRAN (organizing aspects)

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 9:03 AM, oliver <oliver at first.in-berlin.de> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have some ideas for packages that I want to provide on R-CRAN.
>
> One package alreads is working, but I have some warnings in
> when compiling. Also I don't know if the libraries in use are only
> working on Unix/Linux.
>
> So I have some general questions:
>
>  - If I'm not sure if the code would also work on windows
>    (needing some ceratain libraries or tools),
>    would it be better to mark it as Unix-like only?
>
>    Would other people, who are interested in using the package
>    on Windows, then look for the other issues?
>
>    (I'm just interested in providing the functionality, and I don't use Windows,
>     so compatibility would not be my main goal, if it's using certain libraries;
>     but if the code is not relying on certain libs or tools I of course write
>     code ANSI-conform, so that it *should* compile on windows too.)
>
>    I mean: I just want to have the work for Unix/Linux, but in general like the
>    platform-independent approach. I just have no interest, looking at the windows
>    side too much. Are there people from R-CRAN team, who help at that point to make
>    things available on many platforms?
>
>
>  - I have in mind packages for reading a lot of different files / fileformat.
>    How to name them?
>    it would be consequent to name them
>    read.<fileformat>
>    but I'm not sure if this naming style is reserved for OO-methods only,
>    and that topic I will learn later in detail, so that at the moment
>    I just would provide the raw functionality.
>
>    Maybe the name of the reading function should then better be named
>    read<filefomat> or <fileformat>read ?
>
>  - There are a lot of different fileformats that I want to read in.
>
>    Would it be better to make for each format one different package,
>    or rather put them all together as a package "Readmisc"?
>
>    For example the following formats I have in mind:
>
>      - jpeg (libjpeg62)                     => already working, I want to
>                                                clean up the code and documentation
>                                                soon and then provide on R-CRAN
>

Note existence of read.jpeg in the rimage package, read.gif in the
caTools package and readPNG in the png package.

>      - bvh   (maybe (f)lex or yacc or pcre) => want to start this soon
>
>      - apachelogfile /maybe using pcre)     => starting date not planned
>
>      - some other formats also
>
>
>  - Other package ideas: rolling application (which uses R's built in types,
>    not like zoo() using special types)

rollapply and related functions in the development version of zoo do
work with ordinary vectors and matrices:

> # install development version of zoo
> install.packages("zoo", repos = "http://r-forge.r-project.org")
>
> library(zoo)
> rollmean(1:10, 2)
[1] 1.5 2.5 3.5 4.5 5.5 6.5 7.5 8.5 9.5
> rollapply(1:10, 2, sum)
[1]  3  5  7  9 11 13 15 17 19
> rollmean(1:10, 2)
[1] 1.5 2.5 3.5 4.5 5.5 6.5 7.5 8.5 9.5
> rollapply(cbind(a = 1:10, b = 11:20), 3, sum)
      a  b
[1,]  6 36
[2,]  9 39
[3,] 12 42
[4,] 15 45
[5,] 18 48
[6,] 21 51
[7,] 24 54
[8,] 27 57


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