[R] Deducer future?

[Ranjan Maitra]

On Fri, 5 Dec 2014 15:27:10 -0500 Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 05/12/2014 3:11 PM, Ranjan Maitra wrote:
> > On Fri, 5 Dec 2014 12:54:17 -0500 Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On 05/12/2014 12:34 PM, Ranjan Maitra wrote:
> > > > Hi,
> > > >
> > > > I have been using Deducer for the past year for my very basic 100-level introductory statistics classes for students from other disciplines. I really have liked using it for this specific purpose (takes me out of JMP!). However, over the past few months, issues have started cropping up with (some, not all) Windows 7 machines (which I am personally not very familiar with). Most of these problems are cleared when I manually and individually install all the required packages one by one. However, this is tedious to do for me, an instructor, for each and every student, and also means that the main appeal of Deducer: one-click install and GUI is lost.
> > > >
> > > > I have also noticed that Deducer's webpage mentions that it works on R 2.10.0 or greater. However, it is not clear if this project is maintained or not, so therefore, before I invest more time in using this for teaching, I was wondering if the software is being maintained and developed.
> > > >
> > > > I would like to say that Deducer works as advertised and no hiccups on Fedora 20 Linux for R 3.1.2.
> > > >
> > > > Many thanks and best wishes,
> > > > Ranjan
> > > >
> > > >
> > > A question like this could only be answered by the maintainer of the
> > > package.  Have you tried writing there?  (You might already know the
> > > answer if you've reported the "issues" to them.)
> >
> > Thanks very much! I agree. However, I can not tell who the developer/maintainer is, from the www.deducer.org webpage. There are several questions, etc on the associated Google help group (on several topics) but no answers. So I have been "fearing the worst," which is a pity: much as I detest this GUI stuff for everything for my personal use, this was a good (and better) option for these specific classes than JMP. Besides, at least 20% of the students would figure out from the GUI that it was far easier and more efficient to simply write out the commands than to submit using the GUI interface, and the GUI would inform them what they could write (and modify). I came to Deducer after looking at a lot of other related software.
> >
> > Well, I guess I was hoping that the developer was lurking here and he or somebody else who knew could answer.
> 
> Since there is an associated R package, you can find the maintainer's 
> email using
> 
> maintainer("Deducer")
> 
> in R.  That gives me
> 
> "Ian Fellows <ian at fellstat.com>"
> 

Thanks to both you and Sarah Goslee!! I completely forgot about this aspect of R packages. This was so dumb of me! I was looking all over the web trying to figure this out and forgot about the most basic feature.

Thanks again!

Best wishes,
Ranjan

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