[R-sig-hpc] R-sig-hpc Digest, Vol 53, Issue 6

[Jochen Knaus]

Hi Andy,

snowfall is back on CRAN.

Just a sentence to this: I was not involved with the decision of 
removing it - as I knew it would break a lot of packages on either Cran 
and Bioconductor. The Cran team told me they had "discussions" about it 
- without communicating the contents of these discussions. Most likely 
it was a warning in the R 3.0.0 beta checker. Removing the package 
completely (and therefore for all stable R 2.x version) was a bit 
unlucky in my opinion.

Best regards, Jochen

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> Today's Topics:
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>     1. Re: snowfall? (Liaw, Andy)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 8 Feb 2013 08:49:50 -0500
> From: "Liaw, Andy" <andy_liaw at merck.com>
> To: Jonathan Greenberg <jgrn at illinois.edu>, Dirk Eddelbuettel
> 	<edd at debian.org>
> Cc: "r-sig-hpc at r-project.org" <r-sig-hpc at r-project.org>
> Subject: Re: [R-sig-hpc] snowfall?
> Message-ID:
> 	<D5FA03935F7418419332B61CA255F65F819400BC16 at USCTMXP51012.merck.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Besides all that, there is at least one package that is still on CRAN that depends on snowfall, but can't be installed because snowfall isn't available.  I suppose if one already has a previous installation of snowfall, then it's not a problem...
>
> (I personally had not used snowfall, until I tried to install this package that depends on it.)
>
> Cheers,
> Andy
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-sig-hpc-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-sig-hpc-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Greenberg
> Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2013 4:18 PM
> To: Dirk Eddelbuettel
> Cc: r-sig-hpc at r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [R-sig-hpc] snowfall?
>
> Dirk:
>
> Thanks.  I had it installed on my machine from a few months ago, and didn't
> even realize it had been pulled until I had my RA install it.  I have my
> own code that uses snowfall as a requirement, which is also an issue.  I'm
> just starting to work with foreach, but I am teaching a class in the use of
> R, and snowfall makes dealing with clusters a WHOLE lot easier than the
> default snow package -- I don't mind using snow for advanced work, but for
> introducing non-CS students to parallel coding, snowfall help a lot,
> particularly for starting, finding, and stopping clusters.
>
> --jonathan
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 3:11 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:
>
>> On 7 February 2013 at 14:49, Jonathan Greenberg wrote:
>> | R-sig-hpc'ers:
>> |
>> | I just realized that I can no longer install snowfall and it appears to
>> be
>> | gone from CRAN (
>> | http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/snowfall/index.html)-- is this
>> | project dead, or has it been wrapped into something else, or is it just
>> | between versions?  Thanks!
>> |
>> | > install.packages("snowfall")
>> | Installing package(s) into 'D:/Users/jgrn/Documents/R/win-library/2.15'
>> | (as 'lib' is unspecified)
>> | Warning message:
>> | package 'snowfall' is not available (for R version 2.15.2)
>>
>> Removal from CRAN is something that happens to packages which fail to build
>> under R(-release) and the ever changing R-devel (aka R 3.0.0, due out in
>> April).
>>
>> My CRANberries services monitors removals as well additions and updates to
>> CRAN, so yes, I knew.
>>
>> The package is likely still available in the Archive/ section so you can
>> download it from there and install that way.  A little bird told that the
>> snowfall author is planning to updated the package "time permitting".
>>
>> And there are of course the package parallel (in R base), snow, foreach,
>> ...
>>
>> Dirk
>>
>> --
>> Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com
>>
>
>