[R] Rating R Helpers

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Dec 1, 2007 2:21 AM,  <Bill.Venables at csiro.au> wrote:
> To me a much more urgent initiative is some kind of user online review
> system for packages, even something as simple as that used by Amazon.com
> has for customer review of books.
>
> I think the need for this is rather urgent, in fact.  Most packages are
> very good, but I regret to say some are pretty inefficient and others
> downright dangerous.  You don't want to discourage people from
> submitting their work to CRAN, but at the same time you do want some
> mechanism that allows users to relate their experience with it, good or
> bad.

You can get a very rough idea of this automatically by making a list of which
packages  are dependents of other packages.

library(pkgDepTools) # from BioC
AP <- available.packages()
dep <- AP[, "Depends"]
deps <- unlist(sapply(dep, pkgDepTools:::cleanPkgField))
sort(table(deps))

Of course some packages are more naturally end-user oriented and so
would never make such a list and others may be good but just no one
knows about them so they have never been used.   Some packages
might get on the list because an author has two packages and one uses
the other so an enhancement could be to eliminate dependencies with
a common author.