I don't think "At least one of the participants in the 2004 thread
suggested that it would be a "good thing" to track the numbers of
downloads by package." is reasonable because I download R packages for 2
home computers (laptop & desktop) and 2 at work (1 Linux & 1 Mac). There
must be many such cases…
Tom
David Winsemius wrote:
When the question arises "How many R-users there are?", the consensus
seems to be that there is no valid method to address the question. The
thread "R-business case" from 2004 can be found here:
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2004-March/047606.html
I did not see any material revision to that conclusion during the
recent discussion of the New York Times article on the r-challenge to
SAS.
Gmane tracks the number of r-help activity (I realize not what you
asked for):
http://www.gmane.org/info.php?group=gmane.comp.lang.r.general
The distribution of r-packages is, well ... distributed:
http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html
At least one of the participants in the 2004 thread suggested that it
would be a "good thing" to track the numbers of downloads by package.
I have not heard of any such system being installed in the mirror
software and I see nothing that suggests data gathering in the CRAN
Mirror How-to:
http://cran.r-project.org/mirror-howto.html
On the other hand I am not part of R-core, so you must await more
authoritative opinion since a 5 year-old thread and amateur
speculation is not much of a leg to stand on.
There are lexicographic packages for R. One approach to a de novo
analysis would be to do some sort of natural language analysis of the
r-help archives counting up either package names with non-English
names or close proximity of the words "library" or "package" to
package names that overlap the 30,000 common English words. That would
have the danger of inflating counts of the packages with the least
adequate documentation or a paucity of good worked examples, but there
are many readers of this list who suspect that new users don't look at
the documentation, so who knows?
--
Thomas E Adams
National Weather Service
Ohio River Forecast Center
1901 South State Route 134
Wilmington, OH 45177
EMAIL: thomas.ad...@noaa.gov
VOICE: 937-383-0528
FAX: 937-383-0033
______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
