[R] How to search for packages
jiho
jo.irisson at gmail.com
Tue Feb 5 19:21:59 CET 2008
On 2008-February-04 , at 21:10 , hadley wickham wrote:
>> 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
>
> I think crantastic and task views solve somewhat different problems
> (although I agree that crantastic should mirror the task views too).
> Task views are of considerable effort to set up, and often written by
> one person. Tags on crantastic are dead simple to set up and can be
> contributed to by multiple people (although I'm not yet sure what to
> do about potential conflicts)
>
>> 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,
>
> That's a good idea. I do mean to add dependency links in both
> direction, and to automate the updates I just need to get a cron job
> set up.
I like the fact that Task Views are written by experts but the
community aspect of crantastic is really appealing. Depending how the
aforementioned experts feel about crantastic, and how it grows and
scales, I would be very glad to see:
- some "experts reviews" on some packages. some people considered
experts in a field are given special credit and their review stand out
from the rest. While community reviews are nice, I would rather have a
two word advice from _the_ expert than a full book from a community of
ignorants (I am voluntarily exaggerating here). Having both (good
community reviews complemented by one expert advice) would of course
be the ideal solution. An other solution (but that would be in
hadley's hands) would be to have reviews in a wiki form: review text
editable + comments.
- some tag reviews. they would essentially serve the purpose of Task
Views but would probably be more dynamic (since the number of packages
linked to a tag can change) and integrate with the rest.
(Thanks for asking the question by the way)
JiHO
---
http://jo.irisson.free.fr/
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