From edd at debian.org  Mon May 25 02:29:39 2015
From: edd at debian.org (Dirk Eddelbuettel)
Date: Sun, 24 May 2015 19:29:39 -0500
Subject: [Rd] MetaCran website v1.0.0-alpha
In-Reply-To: <55626160.50806@statistik.tu-dortmund.de>
References: <CABtg=Km1Vi1SHK=X2vGiUf+rDrm-05U4n0Gqdbk=rE5o-+xnxw@mail.gmail.com>
	<m2wpzyl371.fsf@krugs.de> <55626160.50806@statistik.tu-dortmund.de>
Message-ID: <21858.27891.426194.718663@max.nulle.part>


Hi Uwe,

On 25 May 2015 at 01:40, Uwe Ligges wrote:
| Thanks for letting us know about the new website. Some comments:
| 
| - Download statistics: Where are they from? CRAN does not monitor 
| downloads generally, maybe some selected mirrors do.

This is the "standard" data set which has been provided by RStudio based on
the downloads from their 0-cloud content-delivery network.

This is not new; if you ever looked at rdocumentation.org (the nice and
useful site by the datacamp folks), they show(ed?) time-series plots of
downloads on the per-package pages.

Gabor has worked for quite some time on nice databasing of these number and
APIs.  He by now has a boatload of repositories at GitHub. For more on
download stats, see eg http://cranlogs.r-pkg.org/ and follow the API docs.

| - Section "Recently updated" can only hold 9 packages, but frequently 
| more than 9 get accepted even within an hour, hence not sure if this 
| makes sense.

C'est la vie.

For any cutoff one suggests, someone else will suggest that the number may be
exceeded. I on the other hand find the site nicely symmetric offering 'top
nine' in all three sections.

| - The links "Download R" and "CRAN homepage" point to a particular link 
| of a mirror rather than the official pages. I'd appreciate if you do not 
| link to selected mirrors. The R homepage on purpose links to 
| http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html when pointing to CRAN.

It may not be so clearcut. As previously discussed, I happen to take the
other side here. I have long changed my scripts and settings on various
machines as the CDN is _clearly_ superior in performance to the various US
mirror I used over the years, some as hardcoded names, some as DNS
round-robin or preference wrappers (eg cran.us.r-project.org).

And by pointing to the "cloud" CDN I don't even need to change the entries
on, say, my laptop when I travel to Europe.  Also, given the popularity and
load on CRAN, I can assure you that throughput is better at cran.rstudio.com.

Hth,  Dirk

| 
| Best,
| Uwe Ligges
| 
| 
| 
| On 24.05.2015 11:44, Rainer M Krug wrote:
| > G?bor Cs?rdi <csardi.gabor at gmail.com> writes:
| >
| >> Dear All,
| >>
| >> [ I was wondering if this should have gone to the new mailing list. Maybe. ]
| >>
| >> As some of you maybe know from my earlier posts, I am building a simple
| >> search engine for R packages. Now the search engine has a proper web site,
| >> where you can also browse CRAN packages.
| >>
| >> http://www.r-pkg.org/
| >>
| >> As I see the value is in
| >> 1. package search (search box on top right)
| >> 2. APIs, see http://www.r-pkg.org/services
| >>
| >> It is in alpha version, meaning that things seem to work, some pages are a
| >> bit slow and there are a lot of glitches to fix.
| >
| > I had a quick peek, and it looks really nice! I particularly think the
| > github integration for diff-ing versions can be very use full!
| >
| > It might be an idea, to also add R itself to the github repo for
| > diff-ing?
| >
| > Thanks a lot,
| >
| > Rainer
| >
| >>
| >> Please tell me what you think.
| >>
| >> Best,
| >> Gabor
| >>
| >> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
| >>
| >
| >
| >
| > ______________________________________________
| > R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
| > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
| >
| 
| ______________________________________________
| R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
| https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org



[Rd] MetaCran website v1.0.0-alpha
Dirk Eddelbuettel