[R] xlsReadWrite package repository for Ubuntu

Hans-Peter Suter gchappi at gmail.com
Tue Mar 3 21:34:52 CET 2009


2009/3/2 Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk>:
> The CRAN Windows ones.  It is a windows-only package, see
> http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/xlsReadWrite/index.html
> (incidentally to you: it seems no longer maintained and does not build under
> R-devel on Windows, see
> http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/2.9/check/xlsReadWrite-check.log
> The maintainer has not responded to requests for a fix.)

I didn't get a request (my email was '<gchappi at gmail> instead of
<gchappi at gmail.com>). I'll look into the issue this weekend.

However there might be a problem because the package contains binary
code and maybe xlsReadWrite has to be put on a place other than CRAN
(I'll ask Rcore about this in a separate email). In any case I
absolutely intend to maintain the package also in future. AFAIK it
works well (apart from a small rowname bug which surfaced recently ;-)
and provides a pragmatic alternative to the OSS R packages gdata and
RODBC)

2009/3/3 Marc Schwartz <marc_schwartz at comcast.net>:
> You perhaps missed the key point in Uwe's response, which is that the
> package is only available under Windows, as it depends upon Windows
> specific functionality (MS Office API via a third party library which is
> available for Windows only) to natively read and write Excel files.

It's correct that xlsReadWrite is currently only available for
Windows. However it doesn't use the MS Office API but  works directly
with the file format (BIFF8), i.e. Excel is _not_ required. True is,
that it uses a third party library (Flexcel, TMSSoftware). This
library supports FreePascal which means that theoretically
xlsReadWrite could be compiled for Linux/Mac (tried once, didn't
succeed, will try again later (now also using Macs and
Debian/Ubuntu)).

-- 
Regards,
Hans-Peter




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