[R] Standards for delivery of GPL software in CRAN packages

[Marc Schwartz]

On Jun 27, 2011, at 7:24 AM, Galkowski, Jan wrote:

> I wondered if there were standard practices in CRAN for delivery of R source implementing functions in R packages. I has encountered a couple of packages where the gzipped version of source contains very little, primarily the Help files describing the functions in the package. In some cases I can find the source as the value of the function name.
> 
> Given that these packages are released as GPL, oughtn't the unoptimized source be freely available, hopefully with comments? Am I missing something? Is there a central place other than mirrors where such source is retained? Sourceforge?
> 
>  - Jan


Can you name the packages in question? 

Within CRAN packages (specifically the .tar.gz package source archives), there will be several sub-directories which contain all sources files. These include:

'R' which contains all R source code

'src' which will contain any C, C++ or FORTRAN code and header files

'inst' which will contain other source code, such as Perl, etc.


If you are looking at the .zip or .tgz files, these are pre-compiled binary, not source archives, to enable Windows and OSX users to install the packages without needing to have development tools (compilers, etc.) present on their systems.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz