[Rd] Improving messaging on successful binary package installation

[Josiah Parry]

Other people may be like me where R is the first programming language I
learned.

 It took probably ~5/6 years or more to learn what “MD5” is and even longer
to understand what a checksum is and why they’re useful.

I think saying it _explicitly_ is helpful. Maybe saying that 1) the package
was installed and 2) it was verified could be a nice balance


On Wed, Jan 29, 2025 at 07:34 Tomas Kalibera <tomas.kalibera using gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> On 1/29/25 15:27, Jeroen Ooms wrote:
> > I have been testing R-devel and really enjoying fast parallel
> > downloading of R packages, especially on mac/win where there is no
> > complication step either, it is super nice.
> >
> > Perhaps the install.packages() messaging could still be improved a
> > bit. Right now if one installs a package on Windows/MacOS we see:
> >
> >    > install.packages('V8')
> >    also installing the dependency ‘Rcpp’
> >    trying URL '
> https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.5/Rcpp_1.0.14.tgz
> '
> >    trying URL '
> https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.5/V8_6.0.0.tgz
> '
> >    The downloaded binary packages are in
> >
> /var/folders/46/wtyv3f9n7g1657wntpn0cl540000gn/T//RtmpMd0YSV/downloaded_packages
> >
> >
> > In the above output, there is no confirmation that the package
> > installation was successful. Instead we get a message that download
> > binary packages are to be found in a temporary directory, making it
> > seem as if the user has to do something with this? This is confusing.
>
> You may have forgotten to mention above that the output also says:
>
> package 'V8' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
>
> which means the installation was successful.
>
> Tomas
>
> >
> > Perhaps the messaging could be improved by not showing this tempir.
> > Instead install.packages() could end with a short success summary
> > like:
> >
> >    Successfully installed packages 'V8', 'Rcpp' in
> >
>  /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.5-arm64/Resources/library
> >
> > Or we could not show any directory at all. But at least the user knows
> > installation has succeeded.
> >
> > While we're at it, the phrasing "trying URL" is a bit odd, both words
> > are redundant in this context. Maybe it can just be replaced by
> > "Downloading"
> >
> > These are silly details but I think they make a difference especially
> > to novice users.
> >
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-devel using r-project.org mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel using r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]