[R] Can one get a list of recommended packages?

[Douglas Bates]

On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 8:37 AM, Dr. David Kirkby
<david.kirkby at onetel.net> wrote:
> R 2.10.1 is used in the Sage maths project. Several recommended packages
> (Matrix, class, mgcv, nnet, rpart, spatial, and survival) are failing to
> build on Solaris 10 (SPARC).

Have you checked the dependencies for those packages?  Some require GNU make.

> We would like to be able to get a list of the recommended packages for R
> 2.10.1, but ideally via a call to R, so it is not necessary to update that
> list every time a new version of R is released. We do not want to access the
> Internet to get this information.

> Is there a way in R to list the recommended packages?

I'm not sure I understand the logic of this.  If you are going to
build R then presumably you have the tar.gz file which contains the
sources for the recommended packages in the subdirectory
src/library/Recommended/. Why not get the list from there?

$ cd ~/src/R-devel/src/library/Recommended/
$ ls *.tgz
boot.tgz     codetools.tgz   lattice.tgz  mgcv.tgz  rpart.tgz
class.tgz    foreign.tgz     MASS.tgz     nlme.tgz  spatial.tgz
cluster.tgz  KernSmooth.tgz  Matrix.tgz   nnet.tgz  survival.tgz

> Better still, is there a way to list the recommended packages which have not
> been installed, so getting a list of any failures?

Again, this seems to be a rather convoluted approach.  Why not check
why the packages don't install properly?