[R-gui] Not a bug in Rcmdr, GUI for require(package)?

James Wettenhall wettenhall at wehi.edu.au
Thu Jul 15 01:43:51 CEST 2004


Hi,

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, John Fox wrote:
> > ERR: Couldn't find function "showData"
>
> showData is in the relimp package, one of several packages
<snip>
> required by the Rcmdr package. Please install all of these
> packages.

I came across a similar issue in a microarray workshop on
Sunday.  When using a GUI, my users seem to expect a
user-friendly GUI interface for the case of missing R
packages, but there is nothing built into R at the moment.

I was thinking of writing something in GraphApp for R for
Windows, so if require(package) fails, the user gets a dialog
box with a few radio buttons, so they can select
- install package from local zip file
- install package from CRAN
- install package from Bioconductor
- continue without installing package

I could try to write a Tcl/Tk version as well.   But after
seeing 25 participants at our workshop on Sunday bring along
25 laptops ALL running Windows, I'm tempted to think that
Windows-specific solutions may be worthwhile in some cases.

I have so many other R-GUI things I want to work on, that I'd
be very happy for anyone to steal this idea and implement it
before I do.  I could provide assistance.  See the windlgs
example package that comes with R, and download the R source to
have a look at the GraphApp source code in src/gnuwin32/ and in
src/gnuwin32/graphapp/

Regards,
James



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