On Oct 26, 2011, at 1:05 PM, Milan Bouchet-Valat wrote: > 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). >
Yes, and that thing drives me crazy so the first thing I do on Ubuntu is to remove it (which is not as easy as it should due to a bug in the bash script as it turns out - another story :P). In 99% of cases it's useless since the suggestions are based on typos ... >> 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) > Well, seeing one of my packages on the list I have to say that there were good reasons, albeit they may not be known to the user, especially since the reasons may be obsolete by now. > 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). > Yes, that could be an optional feature -- I do want to stress the *optional* in the sentence, though. BTW: an ever more intuitive solution (IMHO) would be to auto-complete package names in library( ... Deepayan? ;) That is non-intrusive and in line with the general use of R. Cheers, Simon > > Regards > > ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel