[R] Hunting for snow...

[Uwe Ligges]

Brian Lunergan wrote:
> Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>> On Sat, 8 Jul 2006, Brian Lunergan wrote:
>>
>>> Evening folks:
>>>
>>> I did an install.views of finance and econometrics and between the two of
>>> them R reported 'FracSim', 'RDCOMClient', 'snow', 'VGAM', and 'segmented'
>>> as missing dependencies. Now, I've managed to hunt down what appear to be
>>> current zip file copies of all of the packages but 'snow'. Is there a
>>> windows edition of the package out there someplace that will get along 
>>> with
>>> R v2.3.1 and if so, how do I find it?
>>>
>>> Please and thanks...
>> PLEASE read the README:
>>
>> http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/2.3/@ReadMe
>>
>> and see the check summary at
>>
>> http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/checkSummaryWin.html
>>
>> snow runs distributed R tasks across hosts: it has three modes and
>> prefers PVM and MPI if packages rpvm or Rmpi are available (which they 
>> are not for Windows).  As a result only some of its functionality can be 
>> used on Windows, and anyone who is going to get involved at that level 
>> of programming will very easily install the package from the sources.
>>
> Let me see if I understand this correctly. Something in the finance task 
> view would seem to consider snow a dependency; however, the package in 
> question has dragged it along for the ride into Windows, crippling its 
> usefulness.
> 
> Problem and a question. Having checked the file on the UofT CRAN mirror 
> that lists dependencies for the available files snow only appears attached 
> to three of them, none of which are listed as part the finance view or 
> anything I already have on my system. What is R seeing these as a 
> dependency for then? Perhaps the view maintainers can suggest something? If 
> it is not available for windows and is only partially functional there can 
> it be safely ignored as a dependency?
> 
> One other puzzle resulting from this. The check summary suggested problems 
> with 'FracSim', 'RDCOMClient', 'VGAM', and 'segmented' as windows packages 
> but yet the versions I found seemed to install without complaint onto my 

Where did you find them? At least not in their current versions on the 
official repository on CRAN master for R-2.3.x, I hope.


> system. Three gave back the successful unpack msg. VGAM did not, but 
> several of the demo scripts ran without complaint so I am assuming it is 
> comfortable with v2.3.1 on a windows system. Later versions of the four 
> than were tested in the check summary, perhaps?

The check summary is recent. I can only imagine that you found earlier 
versions...

Uwe Ligges