On 9/3/2012 7:59 PM, Hadley Wickham wrote:
| Hi, see thread "[Rd] Proposal: Mechanism for controlling the amount of
| testing 'R CMD check' performs" on April 8, 2012:
|
| https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2012-April/063809.html
Good proposal, somehow I missed that at the time. Something like this ought
be to implemented in R proper.
In Rcpp, I am now using a similar environment-variable-based approach, and it
doesn't scale particularly well if every (large) package does its own thing.
Is there any approach that's going to be particularly better than
scaling out CRAN's build servers? As a particularly profuse package
author, I'd be happy to pay for the computing time that it takes to
run a full set of tests on my package (and this seems feasible in the
era of on-demand cloud computing).
Hadley
Jim Ramsay suggested we have CRAN generate a pro-forma invoice
when a package is first submitted to CRAN and on each anniversary
thereafter that would be like page charges for journals: If you work
for an organization that knows how to pay invoices, you submit the
invoice to that system. Ramsay said he has grant money and would be
happy to pay a reasonable fee, but he needs an invoice. If you aren't
in such an organization, you are free to plead poverty and pay anything
or nothing. I think we should do the same for R-Forge.
I think the fee should be set high enough that the money
generated would be enough to pay for more hardware AND for someone to
maintain the system. The entirety of humanity will benefit if Ripley,
Hornik, Ligges, Theussl, Zeileis and others spend more time developing
better statistical algorithms and less struggling with computer hardware
and operating systems just to keep CRAN and R-Forge functioning. These
folks and others have done a great job in bringing R to where it is
today. There are now over 4,000 packages on CRAN. If 25% of those pay,
say, 200 (Euros or dollars) per year, for example, that should be enough
to hire a competent sys admin or two with an adequate hardware budget to
keep it all running, I think.
Thanks, Hadley.
Spencer
--
Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
President and Chief Technology Officer
Structure Inspection and Monitoring, Inc.
751 Emerson Ct.
San José, CA 95126
ph: 408-655-4567
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