Post B6EMs3MJhK9gSu0fYW by arclight@oldbytes.space
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 (DIR) Post #B6EMs3MJhK9gSu0fYW by arclight@oldbytes.space
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       I give up. R is an impenetrable trash fire. The system is intentionally designed to violate virtually every standard and good practice of software engineering. R is a desktop tool for desktop people and like Python should never EVER be used to create applications for distribution beyond the distance a human can walk in 30 seconds. It's a personal scripting tool that becomes prohibitively antisocial as soon as application code is shared."Tell me the name, version, and canonical source location+ of every external package needed for this application to function completely and correctly." is apparently an unanswerable question.I need the list of dependencies BEFORE I install this software because it gets installed on a machine with no internet connectivity - I need everything downloaded checked up front. Then I need to write the installation instructions that did not come with the application in such a way as someone other than me can install the software without assistance. That's just fundamental resilience and software lifecycle management. Apparently it's also completely alien thinking to anyone in research or who uses interpreted languages.This is a deeply unserious field and R is substantially worse than almost anything I've touched in the past 2 decades. If I never encountered this cursed mental tarpit again it would be too soon.The hardest part of this is finding the professional language to ask the vendor to provide a full installation manifest and clear detailed instructions for installing their software in a way that preserves an otherwise good working relationship.+ e.g. provide enough information to construct an URL which points at the package source code. Have fun getting that info out of the Byzantine nested dataframe generated by pkgdepends.