I don't think Steven's view is unfriendly per se. Documentation/organization is hard, and saying that some other projects did not do it perfectly either is not a slur on anyone's work.
I tend to agree with Steven's opinion: very few R packages have vignettes (although the good quality ones do), and merely dumping the docstrings in a PDF/HTML file in alphabetical order is not that helpful. Also, selecting a good package from alternatives is sometimes tricky --- I tend to rely on the quality of documentation. I am glad to see that many Julia packages have an intro on the github main page, which can serve as a tutorial/introduction. I think that this is good practice. Best, Tamas On Wed, Jan 28 2015, Hans W Borchers <hwborch...@gmail.com> wrote: > You think the documentation of R packages is very spartan? ... Well, there > you go. > (I thought this mailing list strived to be super-friendly. Recently, I felt > a tendency here to diminish the work of other open source projects. Could > we stop this?) > > To find packages on CRAN, the normal procedure is not to look into the > package list, but into one or two of the Task Views encompassing your field > of interest. I'd be glad if something similar exists for Julia packages -- > those in METADATA and those not yet registered. I wanted to do this for > numerical mathematics, now waiting for version 0.4 before continuing. > > On Wednesday, January 28, 2015 at 10:17:01 AM UTC+1, Steven Sagaert wrote: >> >> I couldn't agree more. Personally I find CRAN to be a mess. There's no >> organization to it. You can only find something in there by googling. Also >> the documentation of R packages is very spartan... >> >> > >>> >>