Hi Andreas, A quick note that the public-use permission for the sample data files on our site (http://geodacenter.asu.edu/sdata) haven't changed and we don't intend to change them in the future. Julia
2009/3/11 Andreas Tille <[email protected]>: > On Wed, 11 Mar 2009, Roger Bivand wrote: > >> Yes, you miss the main point of examples in R packages. They serve two >> functions, one to demonstrate the working of the function on real data (here >> data sets used most often in the scientific literature), for import >> functions these must be real external files, not saved R objects. Secondly >> and most crucially, R CMD check <pkg> is the key QA tool for packages, and >> runs all the examples in a package. Any failure in these shows that an edit >> had unexpected side effects. I often work on packages offline, so the >> package must ship with the real files. > > I'm not fully convinced because a "source representation of the data", a > recipe how to build the ESRI Shapefiles and a MD5 sum would do the same > trick - but for simplicity reasons I understand your point. > >> You can ask the admin at ASU, but I guess that their description is like >> CC BY ND, and I don't think you'll get any more there (CC'ed, attached first >> email from Andreas with copy of Mark's rejection for Julia's information- I >> guess CC BY SA is Mark's minimum requirement?). > > Thanks for forewarding the question. > >> Then let them use another OS and distribution if Debian can't manage for >> reasons of its own choosing. This all works for Task Views, and indeed your >> time and effort would be much better spent on contributing an Epidemiology >> Task View to CRAN. Then any user on any platform could do this >> automatically, right? > > If you restrict epidemiology to R software yes, but in general no and > there is more software out there which is not using R. Chances to > integrate this into Debian which is done by the Debian Med project are > good. I see no reason to discuss the choice of a distribution at this > point. > >> Wrong. Running the examples, and especially examples using the sids (North >> Carolina sudden infant death syndrome) data set may be crucial to >> understanding how to use their own external data, also for epidemiologists. >> Contributed packages are both software and domain knowledge, and examples >> are crucial to learning. > > ACK. > >> I've CCed Julia at ASU, but their conditions for (many) data sets made >> available by (many) researchers are unchanged over many years. > > Thanks for the CC anyway. > >> Note that nothing in this very short document discusses this case. I am >> very sure that the same situation affects the vast majority of R contributed >> packages that include data sets (especially external file format examples), >> but here zealot Mark has put his foot down only because I was careful to >> actually bother to write a LICENSE file. In most other cases, things slip by >> unnoticed. > > You probably have a point here. Thanks for your careful work on the > LICENSE file. > >> With regard to code and documentation, I have no objections, but I do have >> objections wrt. key example data sets, which do not need to be licensed in >> the same way. > > This has to be discussed inside the Debian project. Thanks for the hint. > > Kind regards > > Andreas. > > -- > http://fam-tille.de > -- ************************ Julia Koschinsky, Ph.D. Research Director Arizona State University GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation URL: http://geodacenter.asu.edu Email: [email protected] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
