In a few days I'll give a talk on R package development and my personal experience, at the 3rd Free / Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS) Conference which will take place on May 27th & 28th 2008, in the National Technical University of Athens, in Greece. I would appreciate if you could share your thoughts with me; What are today's obstacles on R package building, according to your opinion and personal experience. Thanks, -- Angelos I. Markos Scientific Associate, Dpt of Exact Sciences, TEI of Thessaloniki, GR "I'm not an outlier; I just haven't found my distribution yet"
On 5/16/2008 2:08 PM, Angelos Markos wrote:> In a few days I'll give a talk on R package development and my > personal experience, at the 3rd Free / Libre / Open Source Software > (FLOSS) Conference which will take place on May 27th & 28th 2008, in > the National Technical University of Athens, in Greece. > > I would appreciate if you could share > your thoughts with me; What are today's obstacles on R package > building, according to your > opinion and personal experience.If you get useful private replies to this, could you please summarize them on the R-devel list? Duncan Murdoch
Wow, this is going open a can :) OK, my comments below in no way discount the enormous efforts of R core, but it is my experience. Using Windows, the biggest obstacles are collecting all programs needed to build the package and then structuring your OS path exactly (exactly) as D. Murdoch says it needs to be. As it turns out, once you collect these programs and fix your path, the package build is actually quite simple. Second, I found building a vignette impossible, so I just drop in the pdf file for distribution. I followed exact directions from the R News article teaching how to do this and made sure everything was set up correctly. After no success, I posted to R-Help where many told me everything seemed to be set up properly, but still no success.> -----Original Message----- > From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org > [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Angelos Markos > Sent: Friday, May 16, 2008 2:08 PM > To: r-help at r-project.org > Subject: [R] R package building > > In a few days I'll give a talk on R package development and > my personal experience, at the 3rd Free / Libre / Open Source Software > (FLOSS) Conference which will take place on May 27th & 28th > 2008, in the National Technical University of Athens, in Greece. > > I would appreciate if you could share > your thoughts with me; What are today's obstacles on R > package building, according to your opinion and personal experience. > > Thanks, > -- > Angelos I. Markos > Scientific Associate, Dpt of Exact Sciences, TEI of > Thessaloniki, GR "I'm not an outlier; I just haven't found my > distribution yet" > > ______________________________________________ > R-help at r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. >
I agree with others that the packaging system is generally easy to use, and between the "Writing R Extensions" documentation and other scattered sources (including these lists) there shouldn't be many obstacles. Using "package.skeleton()" is a great way to get started: I'd recommend just having one data object and one new function in the session for starters. You can build up from there. I've only ran into time-consuming walls on more advanced, obscure issues. For example: the "Suggests:" field in DESCRIPTION generated quite some debate back in 2005, but until I found that thread in the email lists I didn't understand the issue. For completeness, I'll round out this discussion, hoping I'm correct. In essence, I think the choice of the word "Suggests:" was intended for the package user, not for the developer. The user isn't required to have a suggested package in order to load and use the desired package. But the developer is required (in the R CMD check) to have the suggested package in order to avoid warnings or fails. This does, actually, make sense, because we assume a developer would want/need to check features that involve the suggested package. In a few isolated cases (I think I had one of them), this caused a problem, where a desired suggested package isn't distributed by CRAN on all platforms, so I would risk getting into trouble with R CMD check on the platform without the suggested package. But this is pretty obscure, and the issue was obviously well-debated in the past. The addition of a line or two about this in "Writing R Extensions" would be friendly (the current content is correct and minimal sufficient I believe). Maybe I should draft this and submit it to the group. Secondly, I would advice a newbie to the packaging system to avoid S4 at first. Ultimately, I think it's pretty cool. But, for example, documentation on proper documentation (to handle the man pages correctly) has puzzled me, and even though I can create a package with S4 that passes R CMD check cleanly, I'm not convinced I've got it quite right. If someone has recently created more documentation or a 'white pages' on this, please do spread the word. Thanks to all who have -- and continue -- to work on the system! Jay>Subject: [R] R package building > >In a few days I'll give a talk on R package development and my >personal experience, at the 3rd Free / Libre / Open Source Software >(FLOSS) Conference which will take place on May 27th & 28th 2008, in >the National Technical University of Athens, in Greece. > >I would appreciate if you could share >your thoughts with me; What are today's obstacles on R package >building, according to your >opinion and personal experience. > >Thanks, >-- >Angelos I. Markos >Scientific Associate, Dpt of Exact Sciences, TEI of Thessaloniki, GR >"I'm not an outlier; I just haven't found my distribution yet"-- John W. Emerson (Jay) Assistant Professor of Statistics Director of Graduate Studies Department of Statistics Yale University http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jay