R devel - Mar 2014 - The case for freezing CRAN

This has been a fascinating discussion.

Carl Boettinger replied with a set of examples where the world is much more
fragile than
my examples.  That was useful.  It seems that people in my area (medical
research and
survival) are more careful with their packages (whew!).

Gabor Csardi discussed the problems with maintaining a package with lots of
dependencies.
I maintain the survival package which currently has 246 reverse dependencies and
take a
slightly different view, which could be described as "the price of
fame".  I feel a
responsiblity to not break R.  I have automated scripts which download the
latest copy of
all 246, using the install-tests option, and run them all. Most updates have 1-3
issues.
About 25% of the time it turns out to be a problem that I introduced, and in all
the
others I have found the other package authors to be responsive.  It is a
nuisance, yes,
but also worth it.  I've built the test scripts over several years, with
help from several
others; a place to share this information would be a useful addition.

This process also keeps me honest about any updates that are not backwards
compatable.
There is hardly a single option that is not used by some other package,
somewhere.

Terry Therneau

On 21 March 2014 at 07:43, Therneau, Terry M., Ph.D. wrote:
| This has been a fascinating discussion.

I am not so sure. Seems more like rehashing of old and known arguments, while
some folks try to push their work (Hi Jeroen :) onto already overloaded
others.  The only real thing I learned so far is that Philippe is busy
earning publication credits along the line 'damn, just go and test it'
suggestion I made (somewhat flippantly) in my last email.

| I maintain the survival package which currently has 246 reverse dependencies
and take a
| slightly different view, which could be described as "the price of
fame".  I feel a
| responsiblity to not break R.  I have automated scripts which download the
latest copy of
| all 246, using the install-tests option, and run them all. Most updates have
1-3 issues.

Same here, but as a somewhat younger package Rcpp is so far "only" at
189 and
counting, with pretty decent growth.  My experience has been positive too,
and CRAN appears appreciative for us doing preemptive work and trying to be
careful about not introducing breaking changes.  I too see the latter part as
something we owe the users of our package: a "promise" not to mess
with the
interface unless we absolutely must.   

| but also worth it.  I've built the test scripts over several years, with
help from several
| others; a place to share this information would be a useful addition.

I put my script on GitHub next to Rcpp itself, turns out that another thread
participant just a need for exactly that script yesterday.

Dirk

-- 
Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com