From nalimilan at club.fr  Wed Oct 26 19:05:11 2011
From: nalimilan at club.fr (Milan Bouchet-Valat)
Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2011 19:05:11 +0200
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: <1319648716.18216.38.camel@milan>

Le mercredi 26 octobre 2011 ? 12:34 -0400, Simon Urbanek a ?crit :
> 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 we need to connect to CRAN to do that, I indeed withdraw my
suggestion. I had in mind a feature that's present in Bash in some
recent Linux distributions: when a program doesn't exist on the system,
tell the user in what package it can be found (it also detects typos in
program names).

> 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.
There's certainly some truth in your statement. ;-)

OTOH it seems package authors have tried raising the barrier to a quite
high level, and even when knowing what you do, you can get the package
names wrong. Consider for example :
Snowball, but snow and snowfall
rJava and rJython, but RODBC and RWeka
(not to pick on Kurt at all, there are many other examples, but I'm
mainly using these - great - packages)

Maybe a less controversial improvement would be to ask "Did you mean
XXX?" if a package with a very similar name is *installed*. That
wouldn't require fetching information from CRAN, and would most of the
time be helpful (people install packages they use).


Regards



[Rd] Error message library()
Milan Bouchet-Valat