[R] plot graph with error bars trouble

Gabor Grothendieck ggrothendieck at gmail.com
Mon Oct 1 20:24:31 CEST 2007


On 10/1/07, hadley wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com> wrote:
> > These seem nearly identical to what you can get with R-Forge or with
> > TortoiseSVN (and likely other svn clients too).  Since any developer
> > is likely to have an svn client a web interface more sophisticated than
> > what is already available via the net has less utility than if this info were
> > not already available anyways.  Google code can send out email alerts.
> > On the other hand the complexity in dealing with Trac is a significant
> > disadvantage for projects the size of an R package.  I previously used Trac
> > for Ryacas but currently use a WISHLIST and NEWS file (both plain text
> > files created in a text editor) plus the svn log and find that adequate.
> > Clearly a lot of this is a matter of taste and of project size and there is no
> > right answer.
>
> That's true.  From my perspective, using a command line svn client on
> OS X, I certainly prefer the web interface for exploring past commits.
>  However, while any developer will have a svn client, a more casual
> user or someone just interested in looking at the code won't, and I
> don't think the google interface is that friendly.  (Mind you, that's
> probably not a very common use case).
>
> I'm not sure what problems you had with trac and a large repository -
> it works very well for GGobi, with a repository that's almost 2 gig.
> However, it did take me a long time to find a combination of web
> server and trac setup that didn't crash every couple of days.  The
> prevalence of trac spam also has lead me to turn off the wiki and bug
> reporting.
>
> I think it's good to have this discussion about package development so
> that we can learn how others work.
>

I think the casual user just wants to browse the HEAD revision and that
is what google provides and makes easy to do since the interface is not
cluttered with a bunch of links that won't be used anyways.  If they want
more than that they are probably not a casual user but a developer and
have an svn client.

Regarding Trac I was able to use it successfully but its a large
complex system and it just took too much of my time investigating
all the numerous features.  I think its better suited to projects larger
than an R package.

By the way, there are some distributed version control systems that
work with svn such as svk that I had intended to investigate at some
point but so far have not found the time.



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