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

[Gavin Simpson]

On Mon, 2011-06-27 at 11:14 -0400, Galkowski, Jan wrote:
> Fine.  Attached. It's "waved".
> 
> All it has is *.Rd files. Apparently the functions are collected in
> "functionINIT.R". But "00Index" and "DESCRIPTION" are not helpful.
> 
>  - j

The Rd files are the help or manual "pages" for the functions defined in
the package. In this particular case, the package author has decided to
put all the R code for their package into a single R source file -
functionINIT.R. The other two files are R-specific files, the latter of
which is used to describe the package; which, incidentally, points you
to a peer-reviewed paper that the package is support for.

I don't recall the GPL mentioning anything requiring that the source
code be "helpful". The authors have most certainly fulfilled their
requirements under GPL, as has CRAN in distributing the package sources.

Or am I being obtuse and completely missing your point?

G

> -----Original Message-----
> From: b.rowlingson at googlemail.com [mailto:b.rowlingson at googlemail.com] On Behalf Of Barry Rowlingson
> Sent: Monday, June 27, 2011 10:18 AM
> To: Galkowski, Jan
> Cc: r-help at r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [R] Standards for delivery of GPL software in CRAN packages
> 
> 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
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