[R] How to search for packages

[jiho]

On 2008-February-04  , at 21:10 , hadley wickham wrote:
>> The real answer was Task Views on CRAN (most of the OQs topics  
>> *are* already
>> Task Views), so crantastic is very partial. If you have a little  
>> time and want
>
> I think crantastic and task views solve somewhat different problems
> (although I agree that crantastic should mirror the task views too).
> Task views are of considerable effort to set up, and often written by
> one person.  Tags on crantastic are dead simple to set up and can be
> contributed to by multiple people (although I'm not yet sure what to
> do about potential conflicts)
>
>> to really draw in the masses, try doing clickable image maps from the
>> Bioconductor pkgDepTools:
>>
>> http://bioconductor.org/packages/2.1/bioc/html/pkgDepTools.html
>>
>> because some of the unobtrusive short-name packages are key nodes  
>> in package
>> dependency graphs. The dependency trees are very illuminating.  
>> Automating the
>> updates would be positive. If you could also run against the Task  
>> View listings,
>
> That's a good idea.  I do mean to add dependency links in both
> direction, and to automate the updates I just need to get a cron job
> set up.

I like the fact that Task Views are written by experts but the  
community aspect of crantastic is really appealing. Depending how the  
aforementioned experts feel about crantastic, and how it grows and  
scales, I would be very glad to see:
- some "experts reviews" on some packages. some people considered  
experts in a field are given special credit and their review stand out  
from the rest. While community reviews are nice, I would rather have a  
two word advice from _the_ expert than a full book from a community of  
ignorants (I am voluntarily exaggerating here). Having both (good  
community reviews complemented by one expert advice) would of course  
be the ideal solution. An other solution (but that would be in  
hadley's hands) would be to have reviews in a wiki form: review text  
editable + comments.
- some tag reviews. they would essentially serve the purpose of Task  
Views but would probably be more dynamic (since the number of packages  
linked to a tag can change) and integrate with the rest.

(Thanks for asking the question by the way)

JiHO
---
http://jo.irisson.free.fr/