R package requests: ggformula and mosaic (and general query)

[Randall Pruim]

I'm exploring the use of sagemath, pretext documets, and myopenmath for some online courses I (and colleagues) are building.  Our program uses both R and Python.

I'm wondering if ggformula and mosaic can be installed.  We use both in several of our courses.

More generally, I'm wondering if there is a general philosophy about what packages to include on the server.  (There are more packages on our wish list, and I'm wondering whether we should be trying to pare the list down as much as possible, or if you are pretty much happy to install anything people request as long as they are on CRAN.)

Thanks.

[Andrey Novoseltsev]

As a general rule, I am happy to install anything that can be installed in a standard way from standard sources. I also strongly dislike adding more manual steps ;-)

Because of how SageMathCell operates and how SageMath interacts with other languages, you should not expect to be able to use anything interactive - your package of choice should take code, run it, and output something on the terminal or create some files. The user will see this output and get links to files as well. If the package asks questions or tries to create any GUI - tough luck.

I'll install ggformula and mosaic.

Best,

Andrey

[Randall Pruim]

Thanks both for the specific packages and for the comments about the general package philosophy.

[Stacy DeRuiter]

I'm a colleague of Randy's  working on similar things. To support the advanced regression course I am developing, would it be possible to also install the R packages glmmTMB and ggeffects? (They can both be installed from CRAN in the standard way.) 

Sometimes glmmTMB has version issues with its dependencies TMB and Matrix that can be somewhat averted if you do install.packages("glmmTMB", type="source")

(Chances are you may be doing that anyway if it's a linux-based server). Worst case, these issues only affect glmmTMB functionality, nothing else.

Many thanks,

Stacy

[Andrey Novoseltsev]

Done! I rely on standard tools to keep version consistent. There are no upgrades to packages happening regularly, instead everything is rebuilt from scratch every once in a while. Hopefully all the versions remain consistent during the installation process.

Best regards,

Andrey