R help - Jun 2010 - Can one get a list of recommended packages?

R 2.10.1 is used in the Sage maths project. Several recommended packages 
(Matrix, class, mgcv, nnet, rpart, spatial, and survival) are failing to build 
on Solaris 10 (SPARC).

We would like to be able to get a list of the recommended packages for R 2.10.1,
but ideally via a call to R, so it is not necessary to update that list every 
time a new version of R is released. We do not want to access the Internet to 
get this information.

Is there a way in R to list the recommended packages?

Better still, is there a way to list the recommended packages which have not 
been installed, so getting a list of any failures?

Dave

Hello David,

I am not sure I understood your question.

Are you asking what are the packages that the R release comes with?
Or are you asking what recommended packages one should have when installing
R?  (There is a good list to start with
here<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/54763/what-r-package-do-you-use-most>
)

Also, are you asking how to not need to install new packages when upgrading
R?
(For that, you can have a look at a post I wrote on an alternative way for
upgrading R on
windows<http://www.r-statistics.com/2010/04/changing-your-r-upgrading-strategy-and-the-r-code-to-do-it-on-windows/>,
which might give relevant ideas for your case as well)


Best,
Tal


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On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 4:37 PM, Dr. David Kirkby
<david.kirkby@onetel.net>wrote:
> R 2.10.1 is used in the Sage maths project. Several recommended packages
> (Matrix, class, mgcv, nnet, rpart, spatial, and survival) are failing to
> build on Solaris 10 (SPARC).
>
> We would like to be able to get a list of the recommended packages for R
> 2.10.1, but ideally via a call to R, so it is not necessary to update that
> list every time a new version of R is released. We do not want to access
the
> Internet to get this information.
>
> Is there a way in R to list the recommended packages?
>
> Better still, is there a way to list the recommended packages which have
> not been installed, so getting a list of any failures?
>
> Dave
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help@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.
>
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On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 8:37 AM, Dr. David Kirkby
<david.kirkby at onetel.net> wrote:
> R 2.10.1 is used in the Sage maths project. Several recommended packages
> (Matrix, class, mgcv, nnet, rpart, spatial, and survival) are failing to
> build on Solaris 10 (SPARC).
Have you checked the dependencies for those packages?  Some require GNU make.
> We would like to be able to get a list of the recommended packages for R
> 2.10.1, but ideally via a call to R, so it is not necessary to update that
> list every time a new version of R is released. We do not want to access
the
> Internet to get this information.
> Is there a way in R to list the recommended packages?
I'm not sure I understand the logic of this.  If you are going to
build R then presumably you have the tar.gz file which contains the
sources for the recommended packages in the subdirectory
src/library/Recommended/. Why not get the list from there?

$ cd ~/src/R-devel/src/library/Recommended/
$ ls *.tgz
boot.tgz     codetools.tgz   lattice.tgz  mgcv.tgz  rpart.tgz
class.tgz    foreign.tgz     MASS.tgz     nlme.tgz  spatial.tgz
cluster.tgz  KernSmooth.tgz  Matrix.tgz   nnet.tgz  survival.tgz
> Better still, is there a way to list the recommended packages which have
not
> been installed, so getting a list of any failures?
Again, this seems to be a rather convoluted approach.  Why not check
why the packages don't install properly?