Re: Names of R packages

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr> writes:

> when tentatively calling "guix refresh", I saw a number of packages
> called "r-r-...", for instance "r-r-oo". Should this not be simplified
> to "r-oo"? We do not have separate packaging rules for R, but in analogy
> with python and perl, it would make sense to preprend "r-" and at the
> same time drop all other occurrences of R inside the original name.
>
> What do you think?

I’d like to keep it the way it is.  In CRAN there are a number of
packages with very similar names such as “graph” and “rgraph”, or “utils”
and “R.utils”.  There is also a great number of R packages that happen
to start with “R” or “r”, such as “Rmarkdown” or “rtracklayer”.

In the case of “R.oo” (which we name “r-r-oo”) there is no other package
with a conflicting name, but I find it very hard to know when I should
strip off “r-” to get the desired package in other cases.

The prefix “r-” isn’t as long as “python-” or “perl-”, so to me it
doesn’t seem so bad to keep it, especially when it helps disambiguate
packages with otherwise similar names.

~~ Ricardo