2011/8/22 Uwe Ligges <ligges@statistik.tu-dortmund.de>

>
>
> On 22.08.2011 18:43, Rainer M Krug wrote:
>
>> Hi
>>
>> I want to create a dependence diagram of a subset of the packages on CRAN
>> and would therefore like to read the DEACRIPTION files into a list. The
>> list
>> should be as follow for each package:
>>
>> - package name: list
>>   - Package: character
>>   - Version: character
>>   - Date: character
>>   - ...
>>   - Depends: character vector
>>   - Suggests: character vector
>>   - ...
>>
>
> Some of these informations are collected in the CRAN repository's PACKAGES
> file. If those are not sufficient, you can also read separate DESCRIPTIONS
> files, of course.
>
> There is packageDescription() in utils for accessing installed packages'
> DESCRIPTION information or just use read.dcf() to read the DESCRIPTION files
> directly.
>
> Example:
> as.list(read.dcf(system.file("**DESCRIPTION", package="tools"))[1,])
>

Thanks a lot - that works as wished. I have it working, I just have to work
out some smart way of aranging the graph and to delete the versions from the
dependency strings.



>
>
> For the dependency diagram, see
> dependsOnPkgs() and .package_dependencies() (the latter internal) in
> package tools, as well as what these guys wrote:
> Theußl, S., Ligges, U. and Hornik, K. (2011): Prospects and Challenges in R
> Package Development. Computational Statistics 26 (3), 395-404.
>

Nice - I am thinking about the same kind of graphs.

I will post some graphs here as as soon as they loo nice,

Cheers,

Rainer

>
> Uwe Ligges
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>  I downloaded all packages and extracted all DESCRIPTION, but I am
>> struggling
>> with the creation of the list (I tried using scan(what=list(),
>> multi.line=TRUE) with different things in list()). Before I spend to much
>> time on it, is there a function which could help me or has somebody done
>> something similar (I assume the DESCRIPTION file ust be somewhere be read
>> dueing install.packages()?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Rainer
>>
>>
>>


-- 
Rainer M. Krug, PhD (Conservation Ecology, SUN), MSc (Conservation Biology,
UCT), Dipl. Phys. (Germany)

Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology
Stellenbosch University
South Africa

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