[rkward-devel] three enhancemens

[meik michalke]

hi,

i want to share three issues ;-) firstly, regarding package management:
 
if you configure more than one package repo and fetched the package lists, the 
display of available packages is confusing, at least to me... the first sort 
rule is the repos, only then packages are ordered alphabetically. i can't see 
the benefit of considering the repos here at all and would rather have all 
packages ordered by alphabet, because otherwise it's really hard to find a 
certain package by name, even if you know its repo origin. the same, but to a 
lesser extend, goes for case sensitivity, which could be dropped as well for 
the listing order.

secondly, toolbar location:

everytime i have, say, a script open for editing and want to open a data.frame 
from the workspace browser, the moment i click something in the browser 
window, one row of toolbar elements disappears and causes the lower elements 
all to move up. that way, a supposedly chosen object in the workspace moves 
out of focus, which is very irritating. it feels like the object is jumping 
away... i'd suggest to not remove the superfluous toolbar row, but just gray 
it out (and cange contents only if the editor element changes, too) or to fill 
it with some placeholder.

and last but not least, factor to string conversion, which actually seems to 
be more like a bug (might be limited to SVN?) -- well, try this in RKWards 
console:

> some.data <- data.frame(a=c("a","b","c","d"))
> some.data
  a
1 a
2 b
3 c
4 d
> some.data$a
[1] a b c d
Levels: a b c d

so "a" was converted to a factor. then open "some.data" in the editor 
component and change the type of column "a" from "factor" to "strings". now 
look at the object in the R console:

> some.data
  a
1 1
2 2
3 3
4 4
> some.data$a
[1] "1" "2" "3" "4"
attr(,"levels")
[1] "a" "b" "c" "d"
attr(,".rk.invalid.fields")
list()

this is not really what i expect of the conversion to "string". i was first 
surprised that the editor still shows factor levels, and even though type says 
"string" you cannot remove those levels safely. in fact, this doesn't work in 
RKWard either:

> some.data <- data.frame(a=c("a","b","c","d"), stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
> some.data
  a
1 1
2 2
3 3
4 4
> some.data$a
[1] "1" "2" "3" "4"

whereas a plain R session behaves like this:

> some.data <- data.frame(a=c("a","b","c","d"), stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
> some.data
  a
1 a
2 b
3 c
4 d
> some.data$a
[1] "a" "b" "c" "d"

one way to get the same in RKWard is to use I():

> some.data <- data.frame(a=I(c("a","b","c","d")))
> some.data
  a
1 a
2 b
3 c
4 d
> some.data$a
[1] "a" "b" "c" "d"


viele grüße :: m.eik

-- 
dipl. psych. meik michalke
institut f"ur experimentelle psychologie
abt. f"ur diagnostik und differentielle psychologie
heinrich-heine-universit"at 40225 d"usseldorf
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