[R] plot graph with error bars trouble

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "GaGr" == Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck at gmail.com>
>>>>>     on Sun, 30 Sep 2007 21:15:37 -0400 writes:

    GaGr> On 9/30/07, hadley wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com> wrote:
    >> On 9/30/07, jiho <jo.irisson at gmail.com> wrote:
    >> > On 2007-September-30  , at 22:40 , hadley wickham wrote:
    >> > >> hadley wickham wrote:
    >> > >>> [...]
    >> > >> PS if one specifies "errorbars" without specifying min and max one
    >> > >> gets
    >> > >> the error
    >> > >>
    >> > >> Error in rbind(max, max, max, min, min, min) :
    >> > >>         cannot coerce type closure to list vector
    >> > >>
    >> > >>   perhaps a more transparent error message could be supplied in this
    >> > >> (admittedly
    >> > >> stupid-user-error-obvious-in-hindsight) case?
    >> > >
    >> > > Yes, that's a good idea.  I'm still working on making the error
    >> > > messages more user friendly.  I think I'm making some progress, but
    >> > > it's fairly slow.
    >> >
    >> > BTW, have you thought about opening ggplot2 development (provide a
    >> > way to check out the dev code and have the possibility to submit
    >> > patches at least) or do you prefer to keep it a personal project for
    >> > now? I don't know how intricate your research and the development of
    >> > ggplot2 are and would understand that you want to keep in 100% hadley
    >> > wickham if you are to be judged on it academically. But boring work
    >> > such as improving error messages, writing documentation and chasing
    >> > small bugs is probably more efficiently done by a team than by a
    >> > single person, with little free time. Furthermore, most of these
    >> > things can be done without deep knowledge of the architecture of
    >> > ggplot2.
    >> 
    >> It's something I have thought a little bit about, but I haven't made
    >> much progress. Ideally, if it's something that I do for ggplot2, I
    >> should do it for all my other R packages too.  

I don't see why doing it for *some* package(s) should entail
doing it for all of them

    >> should do it for all my other R packages too.  I have thought about
    >> setting up google code projects for each package, which would also
    >> provide a nice set of bugtracking tools.  I've cc'd Gabor on this
    >> email in the hope that he might describe his experiences with this
    >> approach.
    >> 
    >> > I probably won' t be able to make significant contributions before a
    >> > while but I would be happy to see how ggplot2 progresses and which
    >> > directions are taken by following an SVN tree.
    >> 
    >> The one thing that google code currently lacks is a nice timeline +
    >> browser interface.  I find this very useful for GGobi
    >> (http://src.ggobi.org) and would like to maintain that functionality
    >> somehow.  It also makes it easier to track progress of the code
    >> through rss, or intermittent reading of the trac site.

    >> There is also the psychological barrier of giving up complete
    >> ownership of the code, and accepting that people will write code that
    >> is different to the way I'd write it.

indeed. Probably that's the most important hurdle ...

    GaGr> If you already know svn then google code is very easy to use.  Setting
    GaGr> yourself up on it is really just a few minutes of work in that case.  I have
    GaGr> used other similar sites but google code is by far the easiest one to
    GaGr> work with of the ones I have tried. By default everyone has read access
    GaGr> and only you have write access so you still control the project.  You can
    GaGr> browse through the R projects that are already in google code here:
    GaGr> http://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label:R

I would have thought  that R-forge (http://r-forge.r-project.org/)
was really the place (and infrastructure) such community
development of an R package should take place,
or .. why not?

Martin