Quite so. It certainly is the case that Dirk Eddelbuettel suggested
would be very desirable and I think Dirk's track record speaks for
itself. I never said (and I am sure Dirk never intended) that one
could take the raw numbers as a basis for blandly asserting that
<nnnn> copies of <ttt> package are currently installed.
When I update packages, the automated process takes hold and I go for
a cup of coffee. I only have at the moment two computers with R
installed and have not updated any binary packages on Windoze in over
a year. Nonetheless, I do think the relative numbers of package
downloads might be interpretable, or at the very least, the basis for
discussions over beer.
--
David Winsemius
On Mar 7, 2009, at 5:45 PM, Thomas Adams wrote:
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
David Winsemius, MD
Heritage Laboratories
West Hartford, CT
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