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

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 1:24 PM, Galkowski, Jan <jgalkows at akamai.com> 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?
>

The 'package source' link on CRAN should point you to a tar.gz file
that contains the source code. For example, for splancs off the heanet
mirror it is:

http://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/splancs_2.01-27.tar.gz

 .tar.gz files from those links should have full R, C and Fortran source code.

I think we need counter-examples...

Barry