R help - Feb 2002 - R-ex directory in a R package; large software in R

Hi,

To better organize a package, one sometimes wants to place some individual R
files in R-ex directory (at least this
is the way I understand the functionality of R-ex). But how does one
organize the source R package so that 
R CMD INSTALL pkg will know which R files will go into the R-ex directory?
In the implementation R CMD INSTALL pkg, all R files in the pkg/R directory
are automatically merged into a single file. 

A more general and related question is: how does one organize R files in a
package? Should they all just go into pkg/R? To create a large package, this
way of organization is not very desirable. Most of R packages seem to be
relatively small so far. But I am hoping that some larger software can be
built around R. Can people comment on this?

Thanks!

Regards,
Jonathan
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On Fri, 1 Feb 2002 jonathan_li at agilent.com wrote:
> Hi,
>
> To better organize a package, one sometimes wants to place some individual
R
> files in R-ex directory (at least this
> is the way I understand the functionality of R-ex).
No. R-ex/ contains examples automatically extracted from the help pages.
You can put tests in tests/ and other stuff you want installed in inst/

> A more general and related question is: how does one organize R files in a
> package? Should they all just go into pkg/R? To create a large package,
this
> way of organization is not very desirable. Most of R packages seem to be
> relatively small so far. But I am hoping that some larger software can be
> built around R. Can people comment on this?

Presumably it wouldn't be too hard to allow the src/ and R/ subdirectories
to have further subdirectories.

On the other hand, if the source code really does break into nice modular
subdirectories it probably should be a bundle of packages rather than a
single package. Paul Gilbert has taken this approach with his time-series
software, and in a sense R-base does this too.

Also, there's no reason why the structure of a package has to reflect the
structure of your development tree. You might have a huge set of
subdirectories and a make target that produces an R package or bundle of
packages.


	-thomas

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Testing!
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On Fri, 1 Feb 2002 jonathan_li at agilent.com wrote:

[...]
> A more general and related question is: how does one organize R files in a
> package? Should they all just go into pkg/R? To create a large package,
this
> way of organization is not very desirable. Most of R packages seem to be
> relatively small so far. But I am hoping that some larger software can be
> built around R. Can people comment on this?
I would dispute that there are not examples of large packages: certainly
some involve man-years of work.  You will notice that pkg/R is normally
organized into files, each file containing a collection of related
functions. It doen't need to be like that: rpart for example is `one
function, one file' but built from a particular SCCS organization.
But unless the project is really large that seems a natural level of
granularity.

As Thomas has commented, a source package is a distribution model. That is
not how for masters of, e.g. the VR bundle are stored but rather generated
by a script.  For personal use one can omit the INSTALL set and build a
binary package directly if more convenient.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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