Le mercredi 26 octobre 2011 à 12:34 -0400, Simon Urbanek a écrit : > Please, no! We don't want to enter the realm of the computer assuming > it knows what you want to do (which is becoming too common nowadays, > unfortunately, making the interaction more and more annoying). For > some users this error simply means that they mistyped the package > name, so fetching CRAN repos on that behalf ranges somewhere between > overkill and stupidity. If we need to connect to CRAN to do that, I indeed withdraw my suggestion. I had in mind a feature that's present in Bash in some recent Linux distributions: when a program doesn't exist on the system, tell the user in what package it can be found (it also detects typos in program names).
> If the user can't type install.packages() then I am certainly not > confident that the user can use R for any reasonable data analysis. There's certainly some truth in your statement. ;-) OTOH it seems package authors have tried raising the barrier to a quite high level, and even when knowing what you do, you can get the package names wrong. Consider for example : Snowball, but snow and snowfall rJava and rJython, but RODBC and RWeka (not to pick on Kurt at all, there are many other examples, but I'm mainly using these - great - packages) Maybe a less controversial improvement would be to ask "Did you mean XXX?" if a package with a very similar name is *installed*. That wouldn't require fetching information from CRAN, and would most of the time be helpful (people install packages they use). Regards ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel