[TxMt] New R Bundles for testing

[Charilaos Skiadas]

Let me take this email as the opportunity to let everybody know that  
Hans has graciously agreed to take over the maintenance of the R  
bundle and its friends, so you are actually going to see a lot of  
updates to these bundles in the near future than you saw in the past.  
Once Allan is back and Hans gains repository access, these bundles  
will hopefully start the process of getting themselves into the  
repository. In any case, please direct questions about the R bundle  
and friends to Hans.

This is further a good opportunity to ask people about the R Console  
(R.app) bundle. I personally don't find it very useful when R daemon  
is around, and would propose phasing it out. We didn't want to take  
such a drastic step without asking the users, so please let us know  
if you are still using the old R Console instead of R daemon, and if  
so what the reasons for not switching to R daemon are.

Hans, thanks again for taking over.

Haris Skiadas
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Hanover College

On Jan 30, 2008, at 5:42 AM, Hans-Joerg Bibiko wrote:

> Dear R users,
>
> in the last weeks I've looked for a better R integration into TM.
>
> Finally I came up with these three bundles:
>
> 1) R
> In principal I rewrote all commands to be more flexible and to  
> avoid to call R to get some information (except for the command  
> 'Tidy'). I.e to show e.g. a function signature/help/insert a  
> function parameter/completion etc. the command will look for it  
> within R's help file system. This is not only faster but also one  
> has now access to all installed packages. In addition to that these  
> commands also parse the entire R script for function declarations.
> Please note if a command using that index will be invoked for the  
> first time or if you deleted or installed a package the index file  
> will be rebuilt, and this takes some milliseconds.
>
> I also fine-tuned Rmate. Now all plot are displayed inside of the  
> output window as thumbnails (click on it to open; drag it to save  
> it as pdf). Furthermore now it is also possible to send a very  
> large R script to Rmate. By using the old approach Rmate's pipe  
> overflowed.
>
>
> 2) R Console (Rdaemon)
> I fine-tuned the entire Rdaemon. I used it many days and it turned  
> out it's stable, fast, and you're more flexible once you understood  
> the underlying philosophy. In other words it makes really fun. Of  
> course, R is rather complex and I'm sure that I missed some things.
>
> 3) R Console (R.app)
> In that bundle you will find all commands to remote the standard  
> R.app.
>
>
> Both Console bundles are extensions to the R bundle, meaning they  
> make usage of commands, snippets, etc. defined in the R bundle.
>
>
> For each bundle I tried to write an help file. In beforehand sorry  
> for my terrible English, it's fast written and not yet proof-read.
>
> The best thing to start is to read the help file and have a look at  
> the bundle menus.
>
> !!VERY IMPORTANT!!
> Before installing these bundles please backup the 'old' R bundle  
> (maybe, what I did is a flop ;) and delete the bundles R and - if  
> it exists - Rdaemon; quit TM; start TM; and then install the new  
> bundles.
>
>
> All these bundles have beta status. Thus I would be very  
> appreciated if someone could test them and give me any feedback  
> regarding:
> -what doesn't work
> -what is illogical or unclear
> -bad arrangement or key binding
> -what's missing/wrong/unclear in the help file
> ...
>
> plus what Mac OSX version, ppc or intel, which R version
>
>
> If Allan is back I will upload the new R bundle to the repository  
> and both Console bundles to the test repository.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Hans
>
> <R.tmbundle.zip>
> <R Console (Rdaemon).tmbundle.zip>
> <R Console (R_app).tmbundle.zip>
>