[R] Clustering Functions used by Reverse-Dependencies

[Leo Mada]

Dear R Users,

Are there any tools to extract the function names called by reverse-dependencies?

I would like to group these functions using clustering methods based on the co-occurrence in the reverse-dependencies.

Utility: It may be possible to split complex packages into modules with fewer reverse-dependencies.

Package pkgdepR may offer some of the functionality; but I did not have time to fully explore it:
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/pkgdepR/index.html

If such tools are not yet available, I have opened an issue on GitHub and would like to collect any ideas:
https://github.com/discoleo/PackageBrowser/issues/1

There are some model packages that could be used to test the clustering:
1) Rcpp, xml: the core-functionality will always be needed; splitting into modules may not be possible/useful;

2) pracma: most reverse-dependencies are likely using only a small subset of the functions in pracma;
(there was some discussion on R-package-devel about reverse dependencies a few weeks ago)

3) survival: I have no idea in which category it falls - but it has a lot of reverse-dependencies;

Note:
I missed some important functionality from the pkgsearch package. I have started therefore work on a new package (PackageBrowser) - although it is not yet published on CRAN:
https://github.com/discoleo/PackageBrowser

It does not yet process recursively the reverse-dependencies; although this does not seem a big challenge. The real challenge is to parse the code and extract function names. I did some work in the past, but never had time for a full implementation.

Many thanks,

Leonard


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