From hadley at rice.edu  Wed Oct 26 22:06:32 2011
From: hadley at rice.edu (Hadley Wickham)
Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2011 07:06:32 +1100
Subject: [Rd] Error message library()
In-Reply-To: <1EE3E368-AEF7-450C-9331-234A7CBEAE4E@r-project.org>
References: <AA818EAD2576BC488B4F623941DA74275556099D@inbomail.inbo.be>
	<1319626156.18216.15.camel@milan>
	<1EE3E368-AEF7-450C-9331-234A7CBEAE4E@r-project.org>
Message-ID: <CABdHhvFSy74UdHKNSswaom-QviFH6ugZY+yPQFdPcS0OXOiO+g@mail.gmail.com>

> Please, no! We don't want to enter the realm of the computer assuming it knows what you want to do (which is becoming too common nowadays, unfortunately, making the interaction more and more annoying). For some users this error simply means that they mistyped the package name, so fetching CRAN repos on that behalf ranges somewhere between overkill and stupidity. If the user can't type install.packages() then I am certainly not confident that the user can use R for any reasonable data analysis.

In that case, maybe a better message should be:

> library(xyz)
Error in library(xyz) : there is no package called 'xyz'.
Are you sure you are smart enough to use R?

;)

Hadley

-- 
Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair
Department of Statistics / Rice University
http://had.co.nz/



[Rd] Error message library()
Hadley Wickham