beii@vsky m@iii@g oii @oi@com
2021-Aug-21 19:11 UTC
[Rd] Add keywords to descriptions of R packages
It's great that there are almost 20,000 R packages and that experts have curated the R packages in task views, but the volume of packages is such that task view maintainers may limit additions because of time constraints or because they don't want the task views to become unwieldy. I suggest that keywords, chosen by package authors from an approved list, be allowed in package descriptions. The keywords could be the same as task view names (for example "timeseries") or they could be more specialized (for example "garch"). Users would be able to search packages by keyword. Ideally, all R packages would be indexed and discoverable this way. I maintain a list of time series packages that were not in the task view at the time I added them:?https://github.com/Beliavsky/R-Time-Series-Task-View-Supplement/blob/main/README.md. There are almost 130 entries. I also have one for finance:?https://github.com/Beliavsky/R-Finance-Task-View-Supplement . [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
On 21/08/2021 3:11 p.m., beliavsky--- via R-devel wrote:> It's great that there are almost 20,000 R packages and that experts have curated the R packages in task views, but the volume of packages is such that task view maintainers may limit additions because of time constraints or because they don't want the task views to become unwieldy. I suggest that keywords, chosen by package authors from an approved list, be allowed in package descriptions. The keywords could be the same as task view names (for example "timeseries") or they could be more specialized (for example "garch"). Users would be able to search packages by keyword. Ideally, all R packages would be indexed and discoverable this way. > I maintain a list of time series packages that were not in the task view at the time I added them:?https://github.com/Beliavsky/R-Time-Series-Task-View-Supplement/blob/main/README.md. There are almost 130 entries. I also have one for finance:?https://github.com/Beliavsky/R-Finance-Task-View-SupplementThere are already keywords, and (in my opinion) they are not very useful. See Writing R Extensions, section 2.1.1. Even Roxygen2 supports them, using the @keywords token. Duncan Murdoch
FWIW R-hub indexes package metadata, and you can search it online: https://r-pkg.org/search.html?q=time+series or from within R: https://r-hub.github.io/pkgsearch/ Gabor On Sun, Aug 22, 2021 at 12:13 AM beliavsky--- via R-devel <r-devel at r-project.org> wrote:> > It's great that there are almost 20,000 R packages and that experts have curated the R packages in task views, but the volume of packages is such that task view maintainers may limit additions because of time constraints or because they don't want the task views to become unwieldy. I suggest that keywords, chosen by package authors from an approved list, be allowed in package descriptions. The keywords could be the same as task view names (for example "timeseries") or they could be more specialized (for example "garch"). Users would be able to search packages by keyword. Ideally, all R packages would be indexed and discoverable this way. > I maintain a list of time series packages that were not in the task view at the time I added them: https://github.com/Beliavsky/R-Time-Series-Task-View-Supplement/blob/main/README.md. There are almost 130 entries. I also have one for finance: https://github.com/Beliavsky/R-Finance-Task-View-Supplement . > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel at r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel