[Rd] MetaCran website v1.0.0-alpha

[Gábor Csárdi]

On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 7:40 PM, Uwe Ligges <ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de
> wrote:

> Thanks for letting us know about the new website. Some comments:





- Download statistics: Where are they from? CRAN does not monitor downloads
> generally, maybe some selected mirrors do.
>

It's the RStudio mirror only. It is mentioned on the Services page and on
the page of the download count API. It should probably be on the main page,
but 'Most downloaded from the RStudio mirror' sounded very clumsy, even if
it is correct..... Anyway, I'll put it there in some form in a minute.

Btw. I do not think this statistics is the best:
- single mirror, although this is the least of my concerns to be honest.
- if a package is updated frequently, then it is downloaded more
frequently, even if it is not used by more people.
- if a popular package depends on another one, that is downloaded often,
too. Even if it is not used much directly. You would probably want to rank
down these packages  a bit in the search result list. A good example is my
'rversions' package, that is trending like crazy, but nobody really wants
it, only the last version of 'devtools' depends on it.

Ideally, I would want to count the number of 'install.packages()'
invocations, and this is actually technically easy without tracking anyone.
Is CRAN open to talk about this?

- Section "Recently updated" can only hold 9 packages, but frequently more
> than 9 get accepted even within an hour, hence not sure if this makes sense.
>

Click on "Recently updated", and you get the latest 100. You can get even
more with the API, if you want.


> - The links "Download R" and "CRAN homepage" point to a particular link of
> a mirror rather than the official pages. I'd appreciate if you do not link
> to selected mirrors. The R homepage on purpose links to
> http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html when pointing to CRAN.
>

Good points, I'll fix these. I put in that mirror, because it was fast, and
it is bound to be fast from anywhere in the world, whereas the main site
was sluggish from my location at that time.

Thanks!
Gabor

Best,
> Uwe Ligges
>
>
>
>
> On 24.05.2015 11:44, Rainer M Krug wrote:
>
>> Gábor Csárdi <csardi.gabor at gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>  Dear All,
>>>
>>> [ I was wondering if this should have gone to the new mailing list.
>>> Maybe. ]
>>>
>>> As some of you maybe know from my earlier posts, I am building a simple
>>> search engine for R packages. Now the search engine has a proper web
>>> site,
>>> where you can also browse CRAN packages.
>>>
>>> http://www.r-pkg.org/
>>>
>>> As I see the value is in
>>> 1. package search (search box on top right)
>>> 2. APIs, see http://www.r-pkg.org/services
>>>
>>> It is in alpha version, meaning that things seem to work, some pages are
>>> a
>>> bit slow and there are a lot of glitches to fix.
>>>
>>
>> I had a quick peek, and it looks really nice! I particularly think the
>> github integration for diff-ing versions can be very use full!
>>
>> It might be an idea, to also add R itself to the github repo for
>> diff-ing?
>>
>> Thanks a lot,
>>
>> Rainer
>>
>>
>>> Please tell me what you think.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>> Gabor
>>>
>>>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>
>>

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]