Re: R packages in Debian Science (Was: ITP: r-cran-colorspace -- GNU R Color Space Manipulation)
- To: Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de>
- Cc: ross@biostat.ucsf.edu, debian-science@lists.debian.org
- Subject: Re: R packages in Debian Science (Was: ITP: r-cran-colorspace -- GNU R Color Space Manipulation)
- From: Ross Boylan <ross@biostat.ucsf.edu>
- Date: Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:11:25 -0800
- Message-id: <1236319885.30657.94.camel@corn.betterworld.us>
- In-reply-to: <alpine.DEB.2.00.0901280918480.12124@wr-linux02>
- References: <alpine.DEB.2.00.0901201958030.16674@wr-linux02> <1233087861.10883.45.camel@corn.betterworld.us> <alpine.DEB.2.00.0901280810320.12124@wr-linux02> <1233129296.10883.90.camel@corn.betterworld.us> <alpine.DEB.2.00.0901280918480.12124@wr-linux02>
Belatedly....
On Wed, 2009-01-28 at 09:28 +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Jan 2009, Ross Boylan wrote:
>
> > I haven't been following closely enough to know the purpose, but
> > potentially every R package is (or could be imagined to be) is
> > statistical.
>
> Sure. But for instance I'm rather busy packaging r-surveillance
> and other R tools for use in epidemiology. These will go to a
> med-epidemiology package and do staticts under this topic. They
> would be definitely missplaced in a science-statistics metapackage.
>
> The other r-cran-* packages I ITPed are just preconditions and
> while they perfectly fit in the science scope I see better chances
> for categorisation than just trowing them all into the statistics
> bin. For instance:
>
> #512431: r-cran-sp -- GNU R classes and methods for spatial data
> should go to science geography
>
> #512069: r-cran-plotrix -- GNU R package providing various plotting functions
> (it is ITPed as plotrix but should be renamed to r-cran-plotrix
> if only ftpmaster whould tell me which way to fix this makes
> them less work - currently they decided to stay silent at all
> makes a minimum work for them :-()
> I tend to put this into science-viewing because it is rather
> related to creating nice diagrams than doing general statistics.
>
> So I just wonder whether you see better categories than just
> "statistics" if you see the list of tasks at
>
> http://cdd.alioth.debian.org/science/tasks/
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.
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.
The statistical model in msm has many potential uses outside of
medicine; it is definitely not just for epidemiology.
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.
Ross
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