[R-gui] (renamed) What do we do?

[Philippe Grosjean]

Mak Myatt wrote:

>Please humour me on this but I have become confused about the subject of
>our deliberations.

and in another message:

>What is stopping ME from getting my hands dirty is that, without
>agreement that this is the way to go, it might be a lone enterprise which
>will amount to so much wasted effort.

These are really pertinent remarks. I observe, a little bit disappointed,
that we all spend much time in endless discussions on what to do, and what
not to do... but nobody really moves forward in taking concrete initiatives.
And this situation is not new. I recall some discussions on R-help last
year. I just checked also proceedings of DSC 2001
(http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/Conferences/DSC-2001/Proceedings/index.html),
thus almost two years ago. I was striked that a few papers already talk
about the need of a GUI for R,... the feature that would be nice, the way to
do it, tatati, tatata,... And we are almost in 2003 with many volonteers
ready to participate to such a nice project,... but still wondering what
they really could do.

Perhaps, loose discussions on a mailing list is not the best approach, or at
least, complementary tools are required. Personnally, I would like to save
as much time as possible to finish a prototype of SciViews and release it
before March 2003 (I currently have a significant amount of code, but I
still need to put it all together, write minimum required documentation,
etc...). However, I realize that we urgently need some more formal
organization with identified tasks and identified leaders for these
different tasks. A simple thing I can do is to add a web page to
http://www.r-project.org/GUI for this, with a list of running tasks and
identified responsible people (i'll do that next week).

Currently, we have one task (!? obviously we need to extend the list ;-):
- "Specification of a plugin-description language for R-frontends", proposed
by Thomas Friedrismeier [thomas.friedrichsmeier@ruhr-uni-bochum.de]. Thomas
told me however that he has no time enough to manage this task alone. I
repost the document in its current state at
http://www.r-project.org/GUI/plugin/Rplug1.rtf.

Additional propositions and volunteers to start new topics are warmly
welcome.

Philippe

...........]<(({°<...............<°}))><...............................
( ( ( ( (
 ) ) ) ) )      Philippe Grosjean
( ( ( ( (
 ) ) ) ) )      IFREMER Nantes - DEL/AO
( ( ( ( (       rue de l'Ile d'Yeu, BP 21105, 44311 Nantes Cedex 3
 ) ) ) ) )      tel: (33) 02.40.37.42.29, fax: (33) 02.40.37.42.41
( ( ( ( ( 
 ) ) ) ) )      SciViews project coordinator (http://www.sciviews.org)
( ( ( ( (       e-mail: phgrosjean@sciviews.org
 ) ) ) ) ) 
( ( ( ( (       "I'm 100% confident that p is between 0 and 1"
 ) ) ) ) )                                L. Gonick & W. Smith (1993)
.......................................................................