Re: [Gretl-devel] about adding function packages to the menus
On Thu, 19 Jan 2017, Sven Schreiber wrote:
Am 19.01.2017 um 15:32 schrieb Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti:
> On Thu, 19 Jan 2017, Sven Schreiber wrote:
>
>> Secondly, my proposal is that before a package is allowed to appear in
>> the menus it would need to pass some additional checks. For example,
>> this check could be provided by replicating in the example script some
>> known-good result.
>
> I don't like this very much. When you install a package, you give it
> explicit permission to show up in the main GUI somewhere, so you can't
> claim "nobody told me".
You have a point about the explicit menu permission. And maybe the relevant
threshold shouldn't have to do with the menus. But I think we agree that the
level of quality assurance is different between core gretl and the
contributed packages. And I believe it should be communicated to users that
they're taking a somewhat higher risk with contributed packages.
Or lower! Imagine contributions by, say, J Davidson, T Sargent or J
MacKinnon. I'd trust their code much more than mine! ;)
In the world of R, my impression is that users are aware that
they're leaving
core R when they're using packages from CRAN. For the gretl world I'm having
doubts about this, perhaps because of the extremely nice GUI integration of
packages...
Hmmm, I don't quite agree with this. Most R users i know just type
"library(foobarbaz)" away without even thinking about it. Perhaps my
sample is not really representative. But if, for example, you move from R
to LaTeX, I know _for a fact_ that most people often work with
horrendously inflated preambles because they just copy-pasted somebody
else's document and don't really know where a certain macro comes from.
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Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES)
Università Politecnica delle Marche
(formerly known as Università di Ancona)
r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it
http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti
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