[R] Forum of Mac questions (Was: loading packages - mac user)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Jari Oksanen wrote:

> On Tue, 2005-10-18 at 13:13 -0700, Thomas Lumley wrote:
>
>> Both for this and for working out why Tcl/Tk isn't installed you might be
>> better off trying R-sig-mac rather than r-help
>>
>
> This is a very common piece of advice. However, this is not what you
> would imagine if you read the description of R-SIG-mac on the R home
> page:

It is not actually on the R home page or even on www.r-project.org.  I 
think you mean

https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac

This arises because the purpose of the list has changed from

   R Special Interest Group on Macintosh Development and Porting, both for
   MacOS 8.6 - 9.x and MacOS X

I think a wording like R-sig-debian namely

   R Special Interest Group for MacOS X ports of R

would be better.

> R-SIG-Mac R Special Interest Group on Mac Development
>
> This is very similar to the description of R-devel:
>
> This list is intended for questions and discussion about code
> development in R.
>
> And that description is even more intimidating when you read further:
>
> Questions likely to prompt discussion unintelligible to non-programmers
> or topics that are too technical for R-help's audience should go to
> R-devel
>
> Would it make sense to change the description of R-SIG-mac so that it
> would welcome question on R usage in Mac, instead of being a "Mac
> Devolepment" forum that sounds like being "unintelligible to
> non-programmers"?

Which seems quite reasonable to me.  The topics which provoke this 
response usually are questions unintelligible except to Mac 
sysadmins/programmers and definitely `too technical for R-help's 
audience'.


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595