From steven.sagaert at gmail.com  Sun Nov  9 17:24:43 2014
From: steven.sagaert at gmail.com (Steven Sagaert)
Date: Sun, 9 Nov 2014 17:24:43 +0100
Subject: [Rd] organisation of packages & CRAN
Message-ID: <0D578E1F-CA3B-4991-8B25-24924D4DB9AA@gmail.com>

Hi,
I?ve been using R on and off for a couple of years. I think R is pretty great but one thing I?d like to see improved is the way packages are organised. Instead of CRAN being a long list of packages having a short & usually unintelligible name I ?d like to see packages organised in a hierarchical way with that path acting as a hierarchical namespace just like you have in many other languages like Java, C#,Scala,? The names of the (sub)packages should also be clear and unambiguous & packages should be organised according to their functionality and not just for example be code for a whole book thrown together and given a cryptic name. 

Next to that it would be nice to have extra metadata in the packages to allow for another more loose flat multi-class class-action like in tagging blog systems & other metadata to allow for for automatically generating something like task views.

Due to the large number of packages it?s hard to see the forest from the trees so a recommendation system for CRAN based on popularity (download statistics) , ratings & other data  like related packages from package metadata would be most welcome. 

Finally the number of packages in CRAN is exponentially growing but there is also a large partial overlap in functionality between packages & so many packages make it hard to find what you are looking for. So maybe there less is more and there should be a system of removing hardly used/low quality packages on a regular basis.


[Rd] organisation of packages & CRAN
Steven Sagaert