On 12-02-12 5:43 AM, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 5:55 PM, Patrick Burns<pbu...@pburns.seanet.com> wrote:
Now it could be that people are not trying
very hard to solve their own problems, but
to be fair it is a pretty gruelling process
to find the Task Views.
May I suggest that there be a "Task Views" item
on the left sidebar of the R website in the
Documentation section?
I'd go further, and suggest that the list of Task Views appears on
the home page of www.r-project.org under the heading "Look at all
these things you can do with R". (Maybe to replace the 8 year old
clustering graphic (or maybe someone could do something in ggplot2
that looks nice n shiny?) )
"Task Views" (stupid name, who's idea was that?) are an absolute GEM
and shouldn't be slotted between 'What's New?' and "Search" on CRAN
mirror sites. The CRAN Task Views page doesn't even say what "Task
Views" are. Here's some text that might help:
"Task Views are short documents outlining the functionality of R in a
given field or methodology. Since most of R's power comes from add-on
packages downloaded from CRAN, Task Views tend to concentrate on
summarising the packages that are relevant. If you ever find yourself
thinking 'how do I do X in R?' then the list of Task Views should be
your first stop."
One difficulty we have is the ancient HTML used on both www and CRAN.
The main www site is not mirrored, but CRAN is. A link to
CRAN.r-project.org always goes to the main site, and there's some
reluctance to advertise that: it kind of defeats the load balancing
that the mirrors are intended to do.
I'm sure the R community has hundreds of members who could provide the
code to link from the www page to a geographically appropriate CRAN
mirror. Would someone care to offer it?
Duncan Murdoch
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