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

[John Fox]

Dear James,

At present, the Rcmdr package checks that required packages are present and
prints a message if they are not -- e.g., "The following packages required
by Rcmdr are missing: relimp."

What you suggest seems an improvement, and I think it would be best to
implement it in a cross-platform manner. I don't know how to do that via
tcltk or I'd offer to do it. On the other hand, if a user doesn't have an
active Internet connection, how likely is it that he or she will be able to
install missing packages? And for Windows users who do have an Internet
connection, it isn't too much of a leap to use the Packages menu (especially
if prompted by a message to do so!).

Regards,
 John

> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Wettenhall [mailto:wettenhall at wehi.edu.au] 
> Sent: Wednesday, July 14, 2004 6:44 PM
> To: John Fox
> Cc: 'Feng,Yang [Ontario]'; r-sig-gui at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: RE: [R-gui] Not a bug in Rcmdr, GUI for require(package)?
> 
> 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