Re: r-cran-maptools_0.7.16-1_i386.changes REJECTED (fwd)
Hi Andreas,
A quick note that the public-use permission for the sample data files
on our site (http://geodacenter.asu.edu/sdata) haven't changed and we
don't intend to change them in the future.
Julia
2009/3/11 Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de>:
> On Wed, 11 Mar 2009, Roger Bivand wrote:
>
>> Yes, you miss the main point of examples in R packages. They serve two
>> functions, one to demonstrate the working of the function on real data (here
>> data sets used most often in the scientific literature), for import
>> functions these must be real external files, not saved R objects. Secondly
>> and most crucially, R CMD check <pkg> is the key QA tool for packages, and
>> runs all the examples in a package. Any failure in these shows that an edit
>> had unexpected side effects. I often work on packages offline, so the
>> package must ship with the real files.
>
> I'm not fully convinced because a "source representation of the data", a
> recipe how to build the ESRI Shapefiles and a MD5 sum would do the same
> trick - but for simplicity reasons I understand your point.
>
>> You can ask the admin at ASU, but I guess that their description is like
>> CC BY ND, and I don't think you'll get any more there (CC'ed, attached first
>> email from Andreas with copy of Mark's rejection for Julia's information- I
>> guess CC BY SA is Mark's minimum requirement?).
>
> Thanks for forewarding the question.
>
>> Then let them use another OS and distribution if Debian can't manage for
>> reasons of its own choosing. This all works for Task Views, and indeed your
>> time and effort would be much better spent on contributing an Epidemiology
>> Task View to CRAN. Then any user on any platform could do this
>> automatically, right?
>
> If you restrict epidemiology to R software yes, but in general no and
> there is more software out there which is not using R. Chances to
> integrate this into Debian which is done by the Debian Med project are
> good. I see no reason to discuss the choice of a distribution at this
> point.
>
>> Wrong. Running the examples, and especially examples using the sids (North
>> Carolina sudden infant death syndrome) data set may be crucial to
>> understanding how to use their own external data, also for epidemiologists.
>> Contributed packages are both software and domain knowledge, and examples
>> are crucial to learning.
>
> ACK.
>
>> I've CCed Julia at ASU, but their conditions for (many) data sets made
>> available by (many) researchers are unchanged over many years.
>
> Thanks for the CC anyway.
>
>> Note that nothing in this very short document discusses this case. I am
>> very sure that the same situation affects the vast majority of R contributed
>> packages that include data sets (especially external file format examples),
>> but here zealot Mark has put his foot down only because I was careful to
>> actually bother to write a LICENSE file. In most other cases, things slip by
>> unnoticed.
>
> You probably have a point here. Thanks for your careful work on the
> LICENSE file.
>
>> With regard to code and documentation, I have no objections, but I do have
>> objections wrt. key example data sets, which do not need to be licensed in
>> the same way.
>
> This has to be discussed inside the Debian project. Thanks for the hint.
>
> Kind regards
>
> Andreas.
>
> --
> http://fam-tille.de
>
--
************************
Julia Koschinsky, Ph.D.
Research Director
Arizona State University
GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation
URL: http://geodacenter.asu.edu
Email: julia.koschinsky@asu.edu
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