[R] Packages - a great resource, but hard to find the right one

[Bert Gunter]

Antony, et. al.:

Could this be better handled by just having a place on CRAN for users to
express their (unedited/unrefereed, other than to keep thing within the
bounds of civility and courteous information sharing) extended opinions
rather than formal reviews, akin to the numerous websites hosting reviews
of, e.g. consumer appliances or Amazon book reviews? 

Several contributors to this (worthwhile, IMHO) thread have noted the fluid,
informal, and extremely diverse nature of packages. For this reason, I
wonder if trying to fit them within the usual framework of persistent, long
term, generally supported, widely applicable software is appropriate.
Perhaps, given the innovative nature of R (and open source software in
general?) we need to be similarly innovative in thinking about how to deal
with the vexing problem of the embarassment of software riches that packages
represent. My "unsolicited consumer reviews" suggestion above may not be
sufficiently rigorous, but perhaps it may stimulate others to better
approaches.

Incidentally, I thought Hadley Wickham's comments about 1000 reviews adding
to 1000 packages was on point; but wouldn't it be possible to index the
reviews, Google style, to give a much wider "thesaurus" -- to quote another
pertinent comment -- to help in searching? It certainly works pretty well
for Google (and for my research this morning on "slow cookers").

-- Bert

-- Bert Gunter
Genentech Non-Clinical Statistics
South San Francisco, CA
 
"The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning
process."  - George E. P. Box
 
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org 
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Antony Unwin
> Sent: Friday, November 23, 2007 12:51 AM
> To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [R] Packages - a great resource, but hard to 
> find the right one
> 
> Johannes H|sing wrote
> 
> > > Above all there are lots of packages.  As the software 
> editor of the
> > > Journal of Statistical Software I suggested we should review R
> > > packages.
> >
> > You mean: prior to submission?
> 
> No.
> 
> > > No one has shown any enthusiasm for this suggestion, but I
> > > think it would help.  Any volunteers?
> >
> > Thing is, I may like to volunteer, but not in the "here's a
> > package for you to review by week 32" way. Rather in the way that
> > I search a package which fits my problem.
> 
> That's what I was hoping for.
> 
> > One package lets me down
> > and I'd like to know other users and the maintainer about it.
> > The other one works black magic and I'd like to drop a raving
> > review about it. This needs an infrastructure with a low barrier
> > to entry. A wiki is not the worst idea if the initial infrastructure
> > is geared at addressing problems rather than packages.
> 
> We should differentiate between rave reviews of features that just  
> happened to be very useful to someone and reviews of a package as a  
> whole.  Both have their place and at the moment we don't have either.
> 
> If you are willing to review an R package or aspects of R for JSS  
> please let me know.
> 
> Antony Unwin
> Professor of Computer-Oriented Statistics and Data Analysis,
> Mathematics Institute,
> University of Augsburg,
> Germany
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> 
>