R Wiki - Packages

This section is dedicated to R packages. Every package author/maintainer could create a page, publicly editable, dedicated to various package-related material.

Here is a simple way to create and advertise for your package Wiki page:

Login to the R Wiki site (button at the bottom of this page). If you are not registered yet, you should do so (link available at the login page).

Type the name of your future package page in the search box (at top right). This should be something like:

packages:[cran|bioconductor|others]:[pkgname]

with [cran|bioconductor|others] being one of those three choices depending where you package is located (or is intended to be located in the very near future) and [pkgname], the exact name of your package.

The R Wiki engine accepts only lowercase letters, digits, ‘.’ and ‘_’ for page names. So, if your [pkgname] contain uppercases, they will be automatically lowercased by the engine.

A page indicating that the topic does not exist yet appears on screen. Click Create this page at its top left.

Start Editing your page. Add a H1 title first with the name of your package, follow with a short description, name and emails of authors and maintainer, plus other information like the license under which this package is distributed and a link to the place where one can download it1), and of course, any additional material.

If you are not familiar with the R Wiki syntax, look at authoring and wiki, and possibly exercise first in the playground before creating your page.

Click Save. Your page is now created.

Copy its URL in the URL section of your DESCRIPTION file, for instance:

Package: mypkg
Version: 0.1-0
Date: 2006-06-18
Title: My First Collection of Functions
Author: Joe Developer <Joe.Developer@some.domain.net>, with
contributions from A. User <A.User@whereever.net>.
Maintainer: Joe Developer <Joe.Developer@some.domain.net>
Depends: R (>= 2.3.0), nlme
Suggests: MASS
Description: This is just an example description file for mypkg that is
or will be distributed very soon on CRAN.
License: GPL version 2 or newer
 
URL: http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=packages:cran:mypkg,
http://www.otherurl.org

From this moment on, everybody can add useful material (comments, examples, link to course, tutorials, etc. dedicated to your package, ...). An example (minimalist!) R package homepage is presented here.

1) You can easily link to the CRAN homepage of your package by using [[rp>pkgname]], to the index file on CRAN by using [[rpindex>pkgname]], and to the latest PDF version of the package manual by using [[rppdf>pkgname]]

R Wiki - Packages

Packages

Section content