r-cran-msm for Debian Med epidemiology (Was: R packages in Debian Science)

[Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de>]

On Thu, 5 Mar 2009, Ross Boylan wrote:

> I'm not sure if the question is whether the statistics category itself
> could be split up, or whether r-cran-msm would be appropriate elsewhere.

Well, in the Debian Science scope it might fit best into the statistics
section.

> Assuming the latter question was intended, statistics seems like a good
> place for it.  I believe it came out of epidemiology, and the uses we
> are making of it are epidemiological, under a rather expansive
> definition of the term.

Ahh, this is a very valuable hint!  Many thanks.  While I came across
this package because I actually was packaging preconditions for
r-cran-surveillance which is clearly targetting at epidemiology issues
I was not aware that this package might be helpful in itself there as
well.

> The statistical model in msm has many potential uses outside of
> medicine; it is definitely not just for epidemiology.

So I decided for

$ svn diff
Index: epi
===================================================================
--- epi (Revision 1398)
+++ epi (Arbeitskopie)
@@ -8,6 +8,8 @@

 Depends: epigrass

+Suggests: r-cran-msm
+
 Depends: netepi-analysis
 Homepage: http://sourceforge.net/projects/netepi
 Responsible: Andreas Tille <tille@debian.org>

which suggests the package for people who install the med-epi package.
If you think the use is even stronger in this field just tell me so and
I increase it to Recommends.

> I think what that all means is that r-cran-msm would probably also be
> good to add to debian-med, as well as having it in science-statistics.

Thanks.  I hope that ftpmaster will be able to work down their backlog
of packages.  R-cran-mem and other related packages are sitting now for
nearly three weeks in NEW.  I wonder whether I'll be able to include
the new pages into our tasks web pages before they managed to push it
to the mirrors ...

Kind regards

      Andreas.

--
http://fam-tille.de