R help - Nov 2004 - Re: Reasons not to answer very basic questions...

Jim Lemon wrote:
> A.J. Rossini wrote:
> 
>>and perhaps the most important reason for the particular socratic form
>>of teaching on this list...
> 
> 
> Golly, anyone who read Plato's Dialogues would realize that the
Socratic
> method involves patiently leading the questioner stepwise through the 
> solution, not simply writing RTFMeno.
> 
> Jim
> 
Jim, yes, that way works as long as the number of questioners does not 
sum up to "a lot":
It is "easy" to teach courses for 20 people and answer individual 
questions, even if these questions are very basic and have been 
explained more than once during the course.
Courses for 700 people (e.g. basic statistics for economists) in the 
biggest auditory aren't that funny and you have to say "read what 
I/others have written!" - or next month almost each student will be in 
your office asking question he/she could not work out in half an hour 
him/herself ...

So it is my very serious opinion that we need to point people to the 
basic documentation and the FAQ, if they post their first very basic 
question to the list. If the questioner asks the next basic questions as 
well, and with him many others, we will have a flood of many hundreds of 
messages a day!

Uwe

Hi R users:

I want to know any experience compiling R in other LINUX distributions
besides FEDORA (Red Hat) or Mandrake, for example in BSD, Debian,
Gentoo, Slackware, vector LINUX, Knoppix, Yopper or CERN linux?

Hope this is not a "basic question"

Thank you for your help.

Kenneth

Kenneth wrote:
> I want to know any experience compiling R in other LINUX distributions
> besides FEDORA (Red Hat) or Mandrake, for example in BSD, Debian,
> Gentoo, Slackware, vector LINUX, Knoppix, Yopper or CERN linux?
> 
> Hope this is not a "basic question"
> 
> Thank you for your help.
There is considerable experience compiling R under Debian Linux.  Many 
of the developers use Debian and if you check the sources you will find 
that there is a debian directory in the official source distribution. 
The daily package checking is done on a system running Debian and there 
are dozens of R packages in the Debian distribution.  See 
http://packages.qa.debian.org/r/r-base-core for a history of the 
uploads.  The link to the buildd logs shows compilation of R under 
Debian on many different architectures.

Because Knoppix is derived from Debian and uses the Debian packaging 
system the compilation of R under Knoppix is essentially the same as 
under Debian.  The Quantian distribution comes with R installed.

A.J. Rossini wrote:
>
> and perhaps the most important reason for the particular socratic form
> of teaching on this list...
Golly, anyone who read Plato's Dialogues would realize that the Socratic 
method involves patiently leading the questioner stepwise through the 
solution, not simply writing RTFMeno.

Jim