R devel - Jun 2004 - Packages of snippets? (was: A way to list only variables or functions?)

From:   Duncan Murdoch <dmurdoch@pair.com>
>I do understand the feeling of
>writing a nice little function, and not knowing exactly what to do
>with it: CRAN is crowded, and it does seem that an entire package
>just to support one or two simple functions is a bit of overkill.
>Can we work out a way to publish such things? Here's a 
>proposal, with some serious flaws listed below. 
>Can someone fix them?
This would be a good job for a wiki.  The key advantage is it
requires minimal maintenance.  

For an example of how this might work check out the code 
samples (snippets) for the Lua language on their wiki at:

   http://lua-users.org/wiki/SampleCode

Actually there is already an R wiki at:

   http://fawn.unibw-hamburg.de/cgi-bin/Rwiki.pl?RwikiHome

however, no one seems to use it.  If a critical mass were to
post some code snippets it might get off the ground.

> For an example of how this might work check out the code 
> samples (snippets) for the Lua language on their wiki at:
> 
>    http://lua-users.org/wiki/SampleCode
> 
> Actually there is already an R wiki at:
> 
>    http://fawn.unibw-hamburg.de/cgi-bin/Rwiki.pl?RwikiHome
> 
> however, no one seems to use it.  If a critical mass were to
> post some code snippets it might get off the ground.
  Just to add another system to the pile of snippet-libraries, there's 
http://www.zopelabs.com/ , which is a 'cookbook' site of
'recipes' for
Zope. Its a categorised submission system with comments and ratings 
given by the other users. A bit less free-form and hence less chaotic 
than a (poorly-managed) wiki.

  The source code is available, but I've not played with it (yet). Its 
not that active.

Baz

On Wed, 23 Jun 2004 22:51:23 -0400 (EDT), "Gabor Grothendieck"
<ggrothendieck@myway.com> wrote:
>
>From:   Duncan Murdoch <dmurdoch@pair.com>
>
>>I do understand the feeling of
>>writing a nice little function, and not knowing exactly what to do
>>with it: CRAN is crowded, and it does seem that an entire package
>>just to support one or two simple functions is a bit of overkill.
>
>>Can we work out a way to publish such things? Here's a 
>>proposal, with some serious flaws listed below. 
>>Can someone fix them?
>
>This would be a good job for a wiki.  The key advantage is it
>requires minimal maintenance.  
I think a wiki would be fine for making the snippets available, but
code maintenance is essential.  That's why CRAN is more useful than
Statlib:  it has active maintainers who enforce documentation
standards and try to make sure that if you install a CRAN package in a
current version of R it will work properly.

Duncan Murdoch