Re: R packages

[Alistair Crooks <agc%pkgsrc.org@localhost>]

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 02:02:09AM +0000, David Holland wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 09, 2011 at 12:41:44PM -0600, Brook Milligan wrote:
>  > First, all R packages are currently under the "math" category.  I
>  > propose creating a new category "R" and moving them all.  This will
>  > better separate R packages (which are in fact not all math related)
>  > and will prevent overwhelming the legitimate math packages with more R
>  > packages.
> 
> I don't think this is a good idea. We've always sorted packages by
> topic; much as the existing organization is not necessarily great and
> a number of packages are not in the right places (and so on),
> abandoning it entirely seems inadvisable. Also, dumping all R packages
> together would probably tend to encourage people to ignore them.

I agree with David - the packages should exist under their own subject
area (and we took fairly drastic steps earlier on to move all the
localised packages back under their own subject areas, like ja-less,
and ja-mutt and so on).  People don't search for packages by the
method of implementation, I think they tend to look for a subject
area.  This means less these days due to most people using pkgsrc.se,
but it also keeps us, as pkgsrc developers, honest. It also forestalls
problems with scaling in future.

We've not sorted packages into fortran source, java sources, C++ sources
and C, so I don't really see why R should be special.

Best,
Alistair