On 19/10/2020 1:05 p.m., Spencer Graves wrote:
On 2020-10-19 10:34, Rafael H. M. Pereira wrote:
Thank you Dirk and Hugo for your responses. I guess I'll just have to be
patient and wait.
I can only imagine how the CRAN team is overwhelmed by the exponential
growth of package submissions. I wonder, though, whether the CRAN
maintainers and the R community more broadly are thinking about
alternatives to deal with such growing demand without compromising the
speed and consistency/quality of package development. Expanding the team of
CRAN maintainers would be the most obvious solution but I confess I'm not
familiar enough with the whole process to assess what would be the best
routes of action to tackle this bottleneck.
From my experience, it looks to me like their primary approach to
handling the increased volume has been to improve automation. In the
spirit of brainstorming, I'd like to share other ideas on this:
MAKE IT EASY FOR A USER TO CHECK A DIFF FILE OF "Writing R Extensions"
COMPARING THE CURRENT VERSION WITH ANY PREVIOUS ONE.
That's already pretty easy on the sources, using svn diff. The user
just needs to be comfortable using svn.
For example, assuming you have R-devel checked out, run this to see
what's changed since Jan 1, 2020:
svn diff -r {2020-01-01} doc/manual/R-exts.texi
You can do it without checking out a copy with some more typing:
svn diff -r {2020-01-01}
--old=https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/doc/manual/R-exts.texi
There are probably online web services that do this, but I do have it
checked out, so I'm not very interested in them.
For example, every article on Wikipedia has a "View History" tab.
That lists the dates of all the revisions with a terse summary of what
was changed in each. I can click on any two and then click "Compare" to
see all the changes in that period.
I'm not going to reread every word of "Writing R Extensions" every
time I submit something to CRAN. However, I would be willing to review
a diff file if it were easy for me to do that. (And I'm NOT going to
create my own private file copy of "Writing R Extensions" and manually
create such a diff file.)
Now you've got it.
IMPROVE THE COLLABORATION BETWEEN THE CRAN TEAM AND OTHER DOCUMENTATION
OF HOW TO PREPARE A PACKAGE FOR CRAN
I know two sources of information on that:
* Wickham and Bryan, R Packages (https://r-pkgs.org). I
created a
"cran-comments.md" file based on their recommendations, and missed their
comment that it should be in ".Rbuildignore". My latest CRAN submission
was rejected partly because of that.
* Colin Fay, "Preparing your package for a CRAN submission"
(https://github.com/ThinkR-open/prepare-for-cran). These instructions
follow Wickham and Bryan in recommending "devtools::revdep_check()".
Sadly, "revdep_check" is not currently in devtools but in a package
called revdepcheck. Worse, that package is not available on CRAN and
appears twice on GitHub. The original by bbolker has not been updated
in 5 years. The version that is currently maintained is
"https://github.com/r-lib/revdepcheck";. Fortunately, Hadley Wickham is
the leading contributor to the latter, so writing him may help correct
that infelicity, but I should also write to Colin Fay.
Keeping documentation up to date is hard, and maintaining a productive
collaboration is even harder. I don't think even writing the suggestion
in ALL CAPS is enough to bring this about ;-).
CRAN REVIEW GROUPS: There are now 41 different "CRAN Task Views". We
could ask the maintainer of each Task View to try to recruit a committee
around each one to discuss coverage and integration. Each committee
could be asked to coordinate via email and in virtual meetings. They
could be asked to pick 3 standard times for their virtual meetings, so
anyone in the world would not always be excluded from a meeting that was
3 AM their time. Each package maintainer would be asked to specify at
least one "Task View" for each package and be willing to discuss
overlap, etc., with others. This might be a topic for the next useR
conference.
I would suggest a more modest goal: pick one task view in which you
have an interest, and work to improve it. Then move on to the next one...
Most of the contributors to R are reasonable people, but they have their
own priorities. If you can make it easier for them to achieve their
priorities, they'll appreciate it. If you ask them to change their
priorities, they might not.
Duncan Murdoch
______________________________________________
R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
