[R-pkg-devel] UseR! Session: Navigating the jungle of R packages.

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 11 February 2017 at 16:41, Ben Bolker wrote:
|   I don't have a problem with this, but there are a few challenges.
| 
|  - continuity: there used to be an R wiki, but it eventually disappeared
| (http://wiki.r-project.org now redirects to the main www.r-project.org page)

Quite right.

|  - actual contributions: I never got much feedback or contributions to
| http://glmm.wikidot.com/glmmFAQ (which is now moved to
| https://github.com/bbolker/mixedmodels-misc/blob/master/glmmFAQ.rmd ).
| If individual task view maintainers wanted to post their stuff on
| GitHub, it would make it easy for *some* users (those with a bit more
| technical facility) to raise issues and submit pull requests ...)

I fear it's not a panacea.

Some folks thought that GH was a free lunch, moved early and provided some
scripts.  I followed a few years ago, yet still get most suggestions and
contributions by email. The last PR I got was even wrong (as in: to the
output .md file, rather than the source .ctv file).  Still, I like having it
on GH as the (autoconverted) README.md is pretty readable. [2]

But let's add some empirics to this. Almost ten years, following useR! 2007
in Ames a few of us blogged about [1] the (with apologies to Patricia
Hightsmith) "amazing Mr Ripley".  You (!!) actually proposed a three liner to
tabulate SVN logs. Well, some things never change, and the Task View package
is still on SVN.  So without further ado:

  setwd("~/svn/ctv/pkg")
  con <- pipe("svn log")
  x <- readLines(con)
  close(con)
  rx <- x[grep("^r",x)]   # next three lines courtesy of Ben Bolker, circa 2007
  who <- gsub(" ","",sapply(strsplit(rx,"\\|"),"[",2))
  twho <- table(who)
  twho[order(-twho)]

and that shows that Achim is doing the bulk of the work, with many
maintainers updating around twice to three times a year.  

  who
       azeileis           edd       dutangc         pmair      rsbivand 
           1356           224           118            80            69 
       gsimpson         gruen           kmm      thothorn     stefan7th 
             59            51            50            47            44 
        hyndman         fwild    hwborchers         edzer         templ 
             39            34            31            29            28 
       bcomeara     mmaechler        sorenh      ugroempi     bwhitcher 
             27            25            24            21            20 
       mdsumner       khornik          kuhn   schamber789      petzoldt 
             15            14            14             9             5 
     "Matthias"          jfox      karlines  thomasleeper kevinjaunatre 
              4             3             3             3             2 
        nikko18      gmontana 
              2             1

Dirk

[1] One link is http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2007/08/11#ripley_commit_analysis
[2] My two are at
      https://github.com/eddelbuettel/ctv-finance
      https://github.com/eddelbuettel/ctv-hpc

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org