Installing weaver

It is not immediately obvious how one can install weaver (thanks to balajis for telling me about it--see his comment to the Sweave speed issues).

Do the following as superuser for a system-wide install:

1. install digest (from CRAN)
2. install codetools from http://bioconductor.org/packages/1.9/omegahat/html/codetools.html
3. install weaver from http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/1.9/bioc/html/weaver.html

A clunky way to install on Mac OS X and Linux is: as superuser do

R CMD INSTALL packagetarball

I'll add information on how to use it later, but one can always consult the weaver manual/vignette.

How I maintain my data

As soon as you have a lot of experiments floating around, you tend to get a proliferation of code and data files. Usually, chaos ensues. If someone asks you for the data of some experiment you published, you can (a) ignore the request (this is the most economical but also the least ethical response) (b) send them they can realistically use. This post is about how to carry out (b).

Example.

Suppose I have a collection of data and R code that I will cryptically call intml.

1. package.skeleton("intml")
This will create some directories (see previous post)
2. now add the data to the data directory
3. add the .Rnw file you used to analyze the data as a vignette

Build a package as indicated in the last post, and send it to the person who asked for it. Or make it available on CRAN.

It's simple and it enforces a certain self-discipline. Nothing like the knowledge that anyone can read your code to force you to write it properly :-)

Putting together a library

The Introduction to R and other documentation CRAN tells you how to build a library. But it is remarkably hard to find a step-by-step how-to for packaging together an R library. Here is a good one.