[R] Windows versus Unix packages in CRAN ...

[Paul Gilbert]

Tamas Papp wrote:

>On Fri, May 21, 2004 at 09:02:15AM -0300, Rolf Turner wrote:
>
>  
>
>>And I think it is perfectly ***fair*** to say to say that the package
>>maintainers could and should have done a better job of setting up the
>>package to make it run out-of-the-box on Linux.
>>    
>>
>
>You are probably right in saying that they _could_ have done better,
>but I would not use "should" in this context.  AFAIK the package is
>free (as in beer) software, which means that you are not paying for
>it.  The maintainers probably do not need a Linux version (yet), so it
>was not easy to use it under Linux.  Feel free to contribute.  
>
I spend nearly no time supporting the Windows versions of my packages, 
so it would be unreasonable for me to suggest that the maintainers 
should do something special to support systems they don't use.  
However,  they *should* put the code in a standard R package format for 
there own purposes. The package support tools are extremely powerful and 
make a big difference in the amount of support time necessary to 
maintain code. There are additional benefits to doing this and putting 
it on CRAN, to name a few:

  - the code will run on  all R platforms with almost no effort.
  - several aspects of the code and documentario will be checked 
automatically
  - the code will be automatically tested with beta releases of R, so 
there will be an early warning of potential problems.

(BTW,  I would be curious to see the data supporting the claim that "In 
the financial community Windows is the mostly used operating system."   
I would be especially interested if the data is specific to the 
financial engineering and computational finance communities. Is anyone 
aware of a source for this data?)

Paul Gilbert
******