phoible
make phoible an R package?
Something to think about for the long-term. It is possible to release R packages that are data sets only. It would be a nice distribution model (worldwide mirrors) with a built-in versioning and upgrade mechanism. We could also release some purpose-built functions (trump, feature reduction, etc) along with it. Thoughts?
Is there some sort of spec available for what such an R package would look like? I could imagine this to be a useful "download" format for other databases as well. Is there a pypi for R to which to upload packages?
The pypi equivalent is called "CRAN" (analogous to CTAN for TeX and CPAN for Perl). The spec is online somewhere, though I believe within R there's a function called package.skeleton() or similar that builds the required folder structure and seed documents for you (possibly part of the devtools package). The submission process is also documented online somewhere... I've authored one before a couple of years ago, so I am somewhat familiar with the process.
On 10/10/2014 05:25 PM, Robert Forkel wrote:
Is there some sort of spec available for what such an R package would look like? I could imagine this to be a useful "download" format for other databases as well. Is there a pypi for R to which to upload packages?
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/phoible/phoible/issues/56#issuecomment-58632374
I think this would be a cool project but not something we're taking on. OK to close @drammock ?
Closing. Nowadays R no longer defaults to stringsAsFactors=TRUE so there's little risk in distributing the dataset as a CSV. I'd still entertain the idea of releasing a package of tools for doing useful things with the PHOIBLE data, but it's very low priority and I don't need this issue open to help me remember about it :)