neue Rmetrics packages

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

(chopping off good chunks to keep this short)

On 3 October 2007 at 09:25, Diethelm Wuertz wrote:
| I'm no longer sure if GSL has a irregular bivariate interpolation 
| function (which also shape preserving)  ...
| I have to look in more detail into this which needs some time ...

Ok. Keep us posted.  From a top-level view of GSL 1.10, it does indeed look
like it is only univariate :-/

| > That leaves two more:  sn, and the mnormt package that sn depends upon.
| > Could we possibly alter Rmetrics to make this a run-time test and a Suggests
| > rather than a Depends?
| >   
| There was several times the discussion to remove Builtins from Rmetrics -
| so I removed sn and mvtnorm, but at that time I didn't realize that they are
| not available under Debian.
| 
| What would be the best solution ? To add it as Suggests - or again to 
| copy that part of the code as Builtin back  to Rmetrics ?  Missing of sn and 
| mvtnorm will have a  severe influence on Rmetrics, since anything what has to do with
| multivarate assets and portfolios depends more or less on sn and mvtnorm.
| Any suggestions how we should proceed ?

Or your trusted Debian maintainer bites the bullet and packages them ...
Maybe that is the cleanest solution.

Packaging RUnit and robustbase was easy enough last night, so maybe I just
add them. 

| I remember that we had already about two years ago the problem with
| akima. So I was yesterday night looking again into the code of
| fUtilities concerning the point with akima.
| 
| First there is NO akima Fortran/C code in fUtilities. Currently, the R
| functions were written by my own along the R Code of akima which is GNU
| licensed. You find the following lines and similar lines in the code of
| these functions:
| 
| .Fortran(..., PACKAGE = "akima")
| 
| So doing "irregular spaced bivariate smooth interpolation" with Rmetrics
| you will get an error that akima is missing. So the people have to add
| and load the akima package by their own.
| 
| Has anybody a better solution to this problem?

It's a hack, but I am afraid we have not many other choices.  But I think _do_ have
to remove akima from DESCRIPTION::Depends or else R will try to load it at
package build-time, and fail.

| So fUtilities can go to my opinion without any problems to Debian ...

If it builds...

| Concerning fPortfolio, I will do the same procedure. There I will remove
| donlp2 and work in the same way with  .Fortran(..., PACKAGE = "Rdonlp2").

You could wrap a pre-test with require around it.  John Fox is in the same
situation with RCmdr, and instead of depending on ten or so packages, he
dynamically adjusts and sends polite error messages (as tck/tk windows, which
makes sense in his case) suggesting to install the other package.

That may be the best we can do for now.

Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.