From sfalcon at fhcrc.org  Fri Jul 21 03:21:55 2006
From: sfalcon at fhcrc.org (Seth Falcon)
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2006 18:21:55 -0700
Subject: [Rd] DESCRIPTION and PACKAGES files.
In-Reply-To: <86d5c0ypin.fsf@ufl.edu> (Allen S. Rout's message of "20 Jul 2006
	16:45:04 -0400")
References: <86lkqoys6b.fsf@ufl.edu>
	<Pine.LNX.4.64.0607202128260.32650@gannet.stats.ox.ac.uk>
	<86d5c0ypin.fsf@ufl.edu>
Message-ID: <m264hrah1o.fsf@ziti.local>

asr at ufl.edu (Allen S. Rout) writes:

> Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:
>
>> And that is the reason: everyone who downloads pays the price for unneeded 
>> fields in that file.  It was a deliberate decision to minimize download 
>> times, which are already substantial for people on a dialup connection.
>
> OK, that meets the definition of "not well recieved" ;) 

For the Bioconductor project, we also wanted more information to be
programatically available regarding the packages in a repository.
Instead of bloating the PACKAGES file, we put a separate file, VIEWS
in our repository.  Here is an example:

http://bioconductor.org/packages/1.8/bioc/VIEWS

This file is used to generate the HTML pages that describe our
packages (happy to share the code for generating the VIEWS file if you
like).

So, if you were able to host a CRAN mirror, you could annotate it
similarly.

+ seth



[Rd] DESCRIPTION and PACKAGES files.
Seth Falcon