Incubator/Projects/Rkward

Rkward

Sponsor: Mario Fux <fux_AT_kde..org>

RKWard is an easy to use and easily extensible IDE/GUI for R. It aims to combine the power of the R-language with the ease of use of commercial statistics tools.

RKWard's features include:

• Spreadsheet-like data editor
• Syntax highlighting, code folding and code completion
• Data import (e.g. SPSS, Stata and CSV)
• Plot preview and browsable history
• R package management
• Workspace browser
• GUI dialogs for all kinds of statistics and plots

Its features can be extended by plugins, and it's all free software (Above information from the current Rkward homepage.)

Team

List the people committed to the project and actively working on it:

• Thomas Friedrichsmeier
• Meik Michalke

Currently inactive, but with expressed intent to keep contributing:

• Prasenjit Kapat
• Stefan Rödiger

Manifesto Compliance Plan

List the actions planned to get in compliance with the manifesto. Don't hesitate to even list parts of the manifesto which don't require action and highlight why. This part will really be used as a discussion starting point with the project sponsor.

Values

Open Governance

No formal rules set. All people listed of the above (and one past commiter) have "admin" rights on the current SF.net project, and should continue to have admit rights.

Major decisions are debated on the mailing list, and generally made consensually.

Free Software

All sources licensed GPL 2+. Docbook documentation is plain FDL.

Inclusivity

The primary point of contact is the mailing list(s). For fighting SPAM, these require moderation on non-subscribed posters (but the policy is to allow all on-topic posts, possibly with large attachments stripped).

We plan to accept patches via reviewboard. We also plan to establish a side-kick project for external_plugins, which will be hosted on github. (Note: external plugins are plugins not (yet) targetted for inclusion in the official releases. A number of such plugins already exists, and can be distributed in a variety of forms. Of course, external plugins can also be developped completely detached from rkward infrastructure, and in fact some already exist. The idea of this is to offer a semi-official place that is _close_ to the project, and where project members will make contributions, but is not an official part of the project).

Innovation

See section end-user focus: We're actively seeking feedback from our users, and frankly, we don't have a shortage of good ideas coming in...

Common Ownership

The copyright notices currently read "Thomas Friedrichsmeier and the RKWard Team". At some points more specific contributions / names are listed. External plugins are owned by whoever writes them.

GPL 2+ to ensure the sources are nobodies captive.

End-User Focus

We are actively listening to user feedback, although we have quite a backlog of feature requests that we'd like to implement but have not managed to implement, yet.

Infrastructure set up specifically in the hope of end-user participation: - rkward-users mailing list - feedback / discussion forums - feature request tracker - wiki

We are actively seeking to make our mailng lists and forums a friendly place, where nobody needs to be afraid of asking "stupid" questions.

Commitments

• Code of Conduct: KDE Community Code of Conduct
• Contributor License Agreement:
• Established practices:
• Source materials:
• Online services: KDE sysadmins now have admin rights on both the two sourceforge projects ("rkward", and "rkwardextras"), and the launchpad project "rkward" (via membership in the "RKWard Team" on LP).
• KDE Licensing policy: (see point "Free Software")
• KDE branding guidelines:
• No patents

Proposed actions:

• website:
  • Will initially be imported as is.
  • Most of the web page is currently wiki-based, and so some of that will be split out over time. Other sections, not really meant for public edits in the first place (news, downloads) will probably be moved to some other form of content management in the long run.
• mailing list:
  • rkward-devel, rkward-users, and rkward-announce should be imported as they are, including archives and subscribers
    • It will be important that posts to the old addresses will be forwarded to the new lists, as links to rkward-devel and rkward-users are coded into RKWard itself. (rkward-announce was always restricted to posting by admins).
  • rkward-cvs and rkward-tracker would ideally be merged (if that is possible)
• bugtracker:
  • Static links to the SF.net bugtracker / feature tracker are coded into RKWard. Thus the old tracker will have to stay around for some time to come (but no need to wait before migrating existing tickets).
  • We'd like to preserve all open and closed tickets, and
  • find a way to map from old ticket URLs to new ticket URLs, as code comments and commit messages refer to tickets in some cases.
• wiki:
  • Initially to be imported as is. See website.
• continuous integration (build.kde.org):
  • Sure, we would like to have that. No idea on how to set it up.
  • It may make sense to keep launchpad daily builds (https://launchpad.net/~rkward-devel), as this allows us to build for a variety of relevant setups, including systems with old versions of KDE libs, and new versions of R.
• translations:
  • Currently managed on https://translations.launchpad.net/rkward/trunk .
  • No idea on how to migrate, yet.
  • May be of interest, early on, in particular as we are about to achieve translatability of plugins, and this will require some changes to the workflow, anyway.
• forums:
  • We have some old forums that should be archived for reference.
  • It would be nice to have a dedicated forum on forum.kde.org. Not so much in order to control where discussions are going on, but to make it easier for developers and interested users to keep track of discussions on RKWard.
• downloads:
  • ???
• source repo:
  • Most moved to one git repo on KDE.org
    • Repo is in playground/edu at http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=rkward.git .
    • Project page: https://projects.kde.org/projects/playground/edu/rkward
  • "external_plugins" branch split out, and moved to github.
    • At https://github.com/rkward-community/rkward-external-plugins
  • "jss_dec_10" branch split out, and archived read-only somewhere in some form.
    • zip it, and put it on the website? Size as git repo ~20MB (after repacking).
  • Old SVN repo is still available, but compilation from trunk is intentionally broken with a redirect message.

Sponsor Checklists

Candidate ready

Status	Description	Notes
DONE	Project description	...
IN PROGRESS	Project team
IN PROGRESS	Manifesto compliance plan	requires some checks

Incubating

Status	Description	Notes
IN PROGRESS	Repository and code available
IN PROGRESS	Mailing list available
IN PROGRESS	Website available
IN PROGRESS	Active community
IN PROGRESS	Manifesto compliance