From feh3k at spamcop.net  Mon Jan 19 13:58:33 2004
From: feh3k at spamcop.net (Frank E Harrell Jr)
Date: Mon Jan 19 13:57:31 2004
Subject: [Rd] Wish list
Message-ID: <20040119075833.23629579.feh3k@spamcop.net>

> A lot of wishlist suggestions need at least cooperation from R-core, who
> may not agree that a change is desirable even if someone else were to
> write the code. A  bug-tracking system for contributed packages is one
> of the exceptions. There's nothing to stop some package developer(s)
> created a bug tracking system and making accounts available to other
> people(except the time, resources, security issues, etc).

Absolutely, I'm just getting at the need for better ways to provide input
to R-core for their consideration, perhaps.  And I wish that a unified
mechanism would exist for all package developers to use, with some
incentives (or bug-tracking requirements for a package to be kept in
CRAN).

>
> Keeping track of changes is harder. The CVS commit logs for foreign and
> survival are with the log for R itself on
> http://developer.r-project.org.
> It's not even that hard to write R code to read the page and extract
> entries relevant to that package.
>
> For CRAN to list changes to other packages would require cooperation
> from all the package developers. If the maintainer of acepack isn't
> sufficiently together to reply to your messages, he probably won't be
> keeping up with other aspects of change tracking.  Even trying to
> extract a NEWS or Changelog file might not work -- eg for survival the
> Changelog file is Terry Therneau's change log, not my log for changes to
> the R port.
>
>	-thomas

Good points.  -Frank


[Rd] Wish list
Frank E Harrell Jr