On 8 March 2009 at 23:45, Emmanuel Charpentier wrote:
| Le dimanche 08 mars 2009 13:22 -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel a crit :
| > Once you have data, you have an option of using or discarding it. But if you
| > have no data, you have no option. How is that better?
|
| I question 1) the usefulness of the effort necessary to get the data ;
| and 2) the very concept of data mining, which seems to be the rationale
| for this proposed effort.
Re 1), Popcon is used for a few actual tasks as for example guiding in the
knapsack problem of which of the 20,000+ packages should be placed on the
first dvd, which on the second and so on simply to minimise disk swapping
when installing. That's useful in my book, and solves a real problem.
Also, and back to R, consider the relevant page for 'r-base' on Debian (and
forgive them the ugly gnuplot chart)
http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=r-base
This clearly shows a couple of things:
- about 3% of all machines participating have r-base-core [ the main R
package ] installed
- 89% of those also install r-recommended (which pulls in VR, lattice, ...)
- 63% of those have the all-in package r-base installs (which pulls in
r-recommended and documentation package)
- r-mathlib is not very well used
- the debug package r-base-core-dbg is possible underused [ it allows you to
run gdb by installing this package containing matching debug symbols
without having to rebuild; these dbg are very useful but eat up lots of
mirror space, whether they could or should be removed was a recent
internal question
Likewise, you can look at other CRAN package. Here is
http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=lme4
which is only about 0.3% of all machines.
| Furthermore (but this is seriously off-topic), I seriously despise the
| very idea of "popularity" in scientific debates... "Everybody does it"
| is *not* a valid argument. Nor "Everyone knows...".
TTBOMK nobody suggested this.
Dirk
--
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.
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