[Rd] Creating a private CRAN with webpages

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 9 June 2017 at 15:47, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
| On 09/06/2017 07:44, Joshua Bradley wrote:
| > I'm not trying to create a mirror of the CRAN. I also do not want to create
| > a "subset" of CRAN packages. Sorry if my explanation was confusing. There
| > are internal proprietary R packages that I would like to host on a private
| > repo. I like the CRAN web pages that allow a user to browse the various
| > packages from a browser without having to first install them. I want to
| > duplicate the process that CRAN goes through when it generate the webpages.
| 
| But for a repository of your own packages, not CRAN's packages? 
| Everyone who has replied so far seems to have assumed the latter ....

I didn't. 
 
| The scripts CRAN uses to make its 'web' area are not public.  If you can 
| formulate a crystal-clear message, you could ask them for a copy.

No, write it anew, and make it prettier than the still rather awful CRAN
pages which even two years (?) after the overhaul of www.r-project.org have
the pristine and crisp look of 1998 about them. We can do better. It is 2017.

As I showed, turning packageDescription() into a paragraph of text is
trivial.  Displaying reverseDepends and what is too (per CRAN_package_db()).

So just do it.

Make it pretty enough, and hopefully one day someone will give us a prettier
version of CRAN too (beating the combination of inertia, already having
something "good enough", not enough time, and more important things to do --
really not blaming anyone here).

Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org