[R] popular R packages

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 8 March 2009 at 23:45, Emmanuel Charpentier wrote:
| Le dimanche 08 mars 2009   13:22 -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel a  crit :
| > Once you have data, you have an option of using or discarding it. But if you
| > have no data, you have no option.  How is that better?
| 
| I question 1) the usefulness of the effort necessary to get the data ;
| and 2) the very concept of data mining, which seems to be the rationale
| for this proposed effort.
 
Re 1), Popcon is used for a few actual tasks as for example guiding in the
knapsack problem of which of the 20,000+ packages should be placed on the
first dvd, which on the second and so on simply to minimise disk swapping
when installing.  That's useful in my book, and solves a real problem.

Also, and back to R, consider the relevant page for 'r-base' on Debian (and
forgive them the ugly gnuplot chart)

	http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=r-base

This clearly shows a couple of things:

 - about 3% of all machines participating have r-base-core [ the main R
   package ] installed

 - 89% of those also install r-recommended (which pulls in VR, lattice, ...)

 - 63% of those have the all-in package r-base installs (which pulls in
   r-recommended and documentation package)

 - r-mathlib is not very well used

 - the debug package r-base-core-dbg is possible underused [ it allows you to
   run gdb by installing this package containing matching debug symbols
   without having to rebuild; these dbg are very useful but eat up lots of
   mirror space, whether they could or should be removed was a recent
   internal question

Likewise, you can look at other CRAN package. Here is 

	http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=lme4

which is only about 0.3% of all machines.

| Furthermore (but this is seriously off-topic), I seriously despise the
| very idea of "popularity" in scientific debates... "Everybody does it"
| is *not* a valid argument. Nor "Everyone knows...".

TTBOMK nobody suggested this. 

Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.