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CRAN

INTRODUCTION

A rake task that indexes CRAN packages with a basic web interface and cron scheduler for running the task periodically.

DONT KNOW CRAN?

CRAN is a network of ftp and web servers around the world that store identical, up-to-date, versions of code and documentation for R. The use these CRAN Servers to store the R packages.

A CRAN server is just a simple Apache Dir with a bunch of tar.gz files.

Every CRAN server contains a plain file listing all packages in that server.

A package can be accessed via

http://cran.rproject.org/src/contrib/[PACKAGE_NAME]_[PACKAGE_VERSION].tar.gz

A package contains a description file, that contains info about the package.

WHAT DOES THIS INDEXER DO?

  • Extract useful info from the PACKAGES file of the CRAN server.
  • Extract certain info from the DESCRIPTION file of each package.
  • On every run of the task, for the first 50 packages, store info about each package, author(s) and maintainers(s).
  • Prevents duplicate indexes of a version of same package.
  • I used Whenever for scheduling the task. If you use Heroku, Heroku scheduler should do just fine.

RUN IT MANUALLY

rails packages:index

SPECS

bundle exec rspec

IMPROVEMENTS?

  • Pagination for listing packages.
  • I currently use DCF for converting the content of the PACKAGES & DESCRIPTION file to hashes. Maybe I could use a faster library but this does the job as well :)
  • More, more and more