Philosophy aside, albeit not uninteresting, I am wondering about the etiquette of developing a package and then years later dealing with how to have it replaced carefully. Do creators and maintainers have any obligation and especially when there is a large remaining embedded base of users. We may have quite a few Y2K type problems in the sense that some people cannot easily change what is being used. Other languages, like Python, have been dealing with how the newer language features (version 3) have serious incompatibilities with earlier versions and yet some stay with what they have.
Hadley Wickham for example, has been involved in multiple packages including cases like ggplot where it was replaced by another package with enough incompatibilities that it might merit another name. I am not sure what exactly was in plyr when it stopped being changed but in some ways the dplyr package seems to focus on data.frames and plyr was more general. And, I suspect, dplyr also tried to do things consistent with new design approaches such as standardizing where arguments to a function go. It may well be faster when used as planned. But as a possibility, I suspect you could theoretically take the source code for a package that has largely been replaced by others and sometimes make a sort of compatibility version that consists largely of pointers to other packages. Specifically, the documentation could contain a section that suggests alternatives to use. I suspect quite a few of the included functions may be available in base R or another commonly used package (such as the tidyverse collection) and just using the new one, perhaps with some alteration in how it is called, might help guide existing users away to something more likely to be maintained. And sometimes, it might be weirdly possible to have a volunteer do something a tad odd and set up a way to replace the functions in the package. A function call like f(z, data) might simply be mapped into a call to other::g(data, z, flag=FALSE) if that made sense. Other fairly small wrappers might do more such re-direction. Obviously, this would be of limited use if other packages would need to be loaded. I can imagine leaving a package intact and adding a new function with a name like supercede() that would make such a re-arrangement when asked to. The user would normally call: library(plyr) plyr::supercede() Without that additional line, nothing changes. But after calling it, you may now be in a partial compatibility mode. I now retire without being superseded. -----Original Message----- From: R-package-devel <r-package-devel-boun...@r-project.org> On Behalf Of Martin Maechler Sent: Wednesday, September 22, 2021 3:39 AM To: Lenth, Russell V <russell-le...@uiowa.edu> Cc: r-package-devel@r-project.org Subject: Re: [R-pkg-devel] [External] Re: What is a "retired"package? >>>>> Lenth, Russell V >>>>> on Tue, 21 Sep 2021 18:43:07 +0000 writes: > As I suspected, and a good point. But please note that the term "retired" causes angst, and it may be good to change that to "superceded" or something else. well, some of us will become "retired" somewhere in the future rather than "superseded" .. ;-) ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel