[R] How to search for packages

[Roger Bivand]

hadley wickham <h.wickham <at> gmail.com> writes:


> > Also it is staggering that there are over 1200 packages for R .... i was
suspecting close to 1000  .....
> 
> And the site is a couple of weeks out of date, so there are probably even more.
> 

The real answer was Task Views on CRAN (most of the OQs topics *are* already
Task Views), so crantastic is very partial. If you have a little time and want
to really draw in the masses, try doing clickable image maps from the
Bioconductor pkgDepTools: 

http://bioconductor.org/packages/2.1/bioc/html/pkgDepTools.html

because some of the unobtrusive short-name packages are key nodes in package
dependency graphs. The dependency trees are very illuminating. Automating the
updates would be positive. If you could also run against the Task View listings,
which are readily parsable, that would be very helpful.

Roger

> The intent isn't to provide large in-depth reviews, but to make it
> easy to add comments like yours above.  I agree it would be also nice
> to have some central place that lists all articles which cite a given
> R package, but that would be a lot of work.
> 
> Hadley
>