[ESS] Integration of pandoc using polymode+knitr

[Martin Maechler]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 12:47 AM, Ista Zahn <istazahn at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well now I am almost certain to take us far off topic for this list...
>
> On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 4:33 PM, Yihui Xie <xie at yihui.name> wrote:
>> Right -- rmarkdown is not a CRAN package _yet_, but no, it is not tied
>> to the RStudio company in the sense of a software package.
>
> All fine and good as far as I'm concerned. It is common for packages
> to spend some time on github or such before being "ready" for CRAN
> prime-time.

I agree.
>
>  As you can
>> see, it is open source (GPL-3): https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown I
>> do not think there is anything wrong for a company to write open
>> source software packages just because it is a company instead of a
>> university or a non-profit organization. There are great open source
>> products from both *.com and *.org parties. I'm not sure why you are
>> so concerned about the "label", or what your concerns really are, and
>> we (==RStudio) will truly appreciate it if you tell us what we did
>> wrong.
>
> Nothing in my opinion, and I'm curious to hear from Martin or others.
> I like the RStudio IDE (though not nearly as much as I like Emacs +
> ESS + Org-mode), and I hope it succeeds as a company and continues to
> develop useful tools for the R community.

Definitely!  I have said many praises about Rstudio and its staff.
and I do continue tohave the same hope.  Success notably in
conjunction of remaing GPL "all over"
and selling services and not software.

>
> Open source should not stop people from being rich, should it?

Agreed as well!

>> (although I'm not rich...)
>
> Not in principle, but in practice I think it's often difficult. But
> here is where I do get a bit nervous: What is RStudio's business
> model? How exactly will they get rich? Of course there are the
> training services (can't imagine that this keeps the lights on light
> alone pays salaries) and shiny hosting (which isn't out of beta yet).
> So how do you plan to get rich? My fear is that at some point Rstudio
> decides to cash in and start charging for all of the goodies we
> currently get for free. I hope shiny hosting makes enough money to
> support the company, to I fear that the business model may be
> something akin to Facebook in the early days: get them all hooked on
> free stuff, then when everyone is dependent on you hit them with the
> adds (or fees or whatever).
>
>>
>
>> The rmarkdown and related products are still under development.
>> Eventually rmarkdown will be a CRAN package.
>
> Yes, all fine and good, I don't see anything unusual here.

Me neither, now that my "bad feelings" have been lifted.
Thank you Yihui and Ista!
Martin

>
> Best,
> Ista
>
> I see your point about
>> the non-R portion of source code (it is big... or is 8.5Mb really
>> big?), but I guess that misses the goal. The goal is not to write more
>> R (and only R) code in a package, but to have better-looking output
>> with less effort in the low-level tuning of Pandoc parameters. There
>> are plenty of R packages on CRAN that do not primarily contain R code,
>> right? (e.g. packages for datasets, packages using C++, and why should
>> packages containing more JavaScript code be second-class citizens? :)
>>
>> BTW, I'm happy to continue the discussion in private if this is
>> considered off-topic.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Yihui
>> --
>> Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
>> Web: http://yihui.name
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 12:54 PM, Martin Maechler
>> <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
>>>>>>>> Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
>>>>>>>>     on Thu, 27 Mar 2014 01:03:15 -0500 writes:
>>>
>>>     > Hi Mathieu,
>>>     > Sorry for the late reply. The rmarkdown package has made a lot of
>>>     > efforts in generating attractive output by default, including HTML and
>>>     > PDF output, etc. For example, HTML output uses Bootstrap 3 and you can
>>>     > easily switch themes.
>>>
>>> Well, rmarkdown is not a CRAN package... and it seems is really
>>> tied to the Rstudio company.
>>> It looks to me one way to have people flock to using RStudio everywhere..
>>>
>>>     > I know it may be a very bad idea to suggest the RStudio IDE in the ESS
>>>     > mailing list,
>>>
>>> yes...  ;-)
>>>
>>>     > but I still recommend you to try it out. It is super
>>>     > easy to go from an R Markdown document to other output formats. You do
>>>     > not have to remember the Pandoc arguments -- there is a configuration
>>>     > wizard and a little document setting button. Well, I know GUI's
>>>     > probably do not make sense here...
>>>
>>>     > Regards,
>>>     > Yihui
>>>     > --
>>>     > Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
>>>     > Web: http://yihui.name
>>>
>>>
>>>     > On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 9:19 PM, Mathieu Basille
>>>     > <basille.web at ase-research.org> wrote:
>>>     >> Dear Yihui,
>>>     >>
>>>     >> Le 03/11/2014 10:04 PM, Yihui Xie a écrit :
>>>     >>
>>>     >>> I'm glad that your problem was solved. Just as Ahmadou
>>>     >>> mentioned, we
>>>     >>> are heading towards rmarkdown (http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com),
>>> 'we' ==?== Rstudio employees, or ??
>>> I'm really getting a bit concerned here.
>>> I liked Rstudio when it was *.org, and have been getting
>>> increasingly nervous, now that it has been *.com ...
>>>
>>> As mentioned above, why should we suddenly have to work with a non-CRAN package?
>>> Also, is 'rmarkdown' (as a standard) something to be defined outside of the
>>> Rstudio web site any time soon?
>>> I've started using *.Rmd (and Rstudio to some extent) in
>>> teaching, but I'm really having concerns more and more.
>>>
>>>     >>>  which is a nice alternative to knitr::pandoc().
>>>
>>> Then, knitr is a CRAN package with GPL licence,
>>> so we can rely that it will continue to be available into the future.
>>> (Ok, I see that rmarkdown also has a GPL licence.. and it is on
>>>  github, just not on CRAN, and it contains 8.5 MB of source code,
>>>  most of which is java script ... ... )
>>>
>>>     >> would be fairly easy to use any other function, such as rmarkdown::render
>>>     >> instead of knitr::pandoc. As for me, as I already use knitr (obviously) to
>>>     >> knit, and pandoc is also installed on my system, it makes more sense to use
>>>     >> what's available!
>>>
>>> and what is simple and modular..  The rmarkdown with all its new
>>> bells and whistle and huge amounts of non-R source code, has its
>>> advantages but also its drawbacks in my view.
>>>
>>> Martin
>>>
>>>     >> Or maybe I'm missing the obvious: is there a strong
>>>     >> argument in favor of rmarkdown::render instead of knitr::pandoc?
>>>     >>
>>>     >> Mathieu.