[rkward-devel] first RKWard enhancer on CRAN

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi,

On Wednesday 14 September 2011, meik michalke wrote:
> btw., can we safely remove the "delete_this_folder..." folder there?

yes, except we can't, due to the wrong file permissions. We'll have to file a 
support request with sourceforge to get rid of it.
 
> in theory it can do all of that, except for uploading to the repo. the
> problem is that in order to create a usable PACKAGES file for the actual
> repo, all packages which should be available must be present in the
> scanned folder. so you'd either have to run the command on the server, or
> have an up-to-date local copy of the full repo. my guess is that we should
> probably assign one person as the repository maintainer, and since i was
> volunteering for that in good old GHNS times, i'd offer myself for this
> job, too ;-) so developers would just need to provide me with the package
> source file and i'll sync it with the repository.

Ok, good. In the mid term, please consider documenting / scripting the steps 
involved, though, so others can easily jump in, in case you are temporarily 
unavailable. SVN already has directories "techdocs" and "scripts" for such 
purposes.
 
> then, you wouldn't need roxyPackage as a plugin developer, because
> rk.plugin.skeleton() in rkwarddev already creates R package skeletons, so
> once you tar.gzipped the reated root folder, you'd have an installable
> package source archive.

Nice!

Three more suggestions for enhancements:
1. path could default to tempdir()
2. Having to specify all the <about> information as the very first step may 
look a bit scary. It would be nice, if this could be simplified some further. 
Perhaps (just a thought), there should be an additional function which 
provides a suitable list with guessable values guessed (such as relase date, R 
min version, rkward min version), and non-guessable values filled with 
appropriate prompts (like "YOUR_EMAIL at YOUR_PROVIDER"). Then that could be 
supplied as default parameter to rk.plugin.skeleton().
I suspect, typically, people will want to "work on a plugin", first, and worry 
about "formalities" later, when they are ready to share their work. We should 
be careful not to force them to do it the other way around, even if this means 
some more manual editing, later.
3. .tar.gzipping the created folder should be easy enough, but just to make 
this really obvious, I suggest wrapping this step into an additional function 
rk.create.package() (or rk.package.plugin(), or whatever). Later, that 
function could also be extended to do some checks on the package (e.g. for 
completeness of <about>-info, existence of automated tests, etc.).

Regards
Thomas
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