On 13/09/2013 10:18 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
On 13 September 2013 at 09:51, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
| Changes are generally announced in the NEWS.Rd file long before release,
| but R-devel is an unreleased version, so you won't see the news until it
| is there. Announcing things that nobody can try leads to fewer useful
| comments than putting them into R-devel where at least people can see
| what is really happening.
That comment makes sense _in theory_.
Yet _in practice_ it does not as many of us have been shot down by tests in
R-devel which had been implemented within a 48 hour window of the package
submission.
It sounds as though you are talking about CRAN here, not R. I can't
speak for CRAN.
Absent a time machine or psychic powers, I do not see how package developers
can reasonably be expected to cope with this.
I'm a CRAN user as a package developer, and I do get emails about
changes, but I don't find them overwhelming, and I don't recall
receiving any that were irrational. Generally the package is improved
when I follow their advice. It has happened that I have been slower
than they liked in responding, but the world didn't end.
I imagine Rcpp pushes the limits more than my packages do, but I think
most developers can cope. After all, the number of packages on CRAN is
increasing, not decreasing.
Duncan Murdoch
I am not close to Python, but the little I know about their PEP system makes
me think that a process in which changes are first announced as concepts,
then discussed and refined and only thereafter implemented seems somewhat
appealing.
Dirk
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