[Rd] Re: [R] A long digression on packages

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 5 June 2005 at 17:31, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
| Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> writes:
| 
| > Jim raises good points, as do the replies. On the topic of '500+ and
| > growing', let me add my pet peeve: It is mighty impossible to know /what/
| > changed /when/ in CRANland.
| > 
| > Being Debian maintainer for a fair number of packages, I owe users of those
| > packages timely updates. But the best I can do is to look at the
| > timestamp-sorted source directory http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/?M=D
| > That is tedious, as well as error-prone.  Moreover, as an R user, I'd like to
| > know what is being added and, and what is being changed. There is no way to
| > know right now.
| > 
| > I would not be hard to write a little monitoring script that looks at the
| > directory (and keeps tab in a Rdata structure, or SQLite db, or ...) and
| > spits out either emails, or maybe rss-feed updates, of either or both of 'new
| > packages' or 'new versions'.  If additionally we would enforce (err let's
| > start with encourage) a standardised changelog (say $SRC/inst/CHANGES or
| > $SRC/inst/ChangeLog) then that could get parsed too.  I had meant to play
| > with some code for this for a while now but it just hasn't happened.
| > Whining on a list is easier than writing code, unfortunately...
| > 
| > Comments?
| 
| You might want to have a closer look at the way recommended packages
| are handled by an R distribution build, using rsync, links,
| timestamps, and makefile rules. 

And recode/adapt that for the packages I am interested in? Works, but doesn't
scale.  But maybe I am misunderstanding you here.

Dirk

-- 
Statistics: The (futile) attempt to offer certainty about uncertainty.
         -- Roger Koenker, 'Dictionary of Received Ideas of Statistics'