[Rd] Is xtable still being maintained?

[Spencer Graves]

On 9/10/2011 10:19 AM, oliver wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 07:40:24AM -0700, Spencer Graves wrote:
>>
>> On 9/10/2011 6:06 AM, Uwe Ligges wrote:
>>>
>>> On 10.09.2011 13:26, Alastair wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> I wonder if anyone knows if the xtable package is still actively being
>>>> maintained? The last update to the CRAN was about 2 years ago.
>>>> Earlier in
>>>> the year I found I wanted to use the short caption option of
>>>> LaTeX tables to
>>>> display an abridged title in my table of contents. It was a relatively
>>>> simple change to get xtable to support this. I bundled up my changes and
>>>> sent the maintainer David B. Dahl an email and I got absolutely
>>>> no response?
>>> Try to "ping" - at least I do so in this case. No response would
>>> be unfortunate, of course.
>>
>>        David B. Dahl still has a web site as an Associate Professor
>> at Texas A&M U.
>>>
>>>> What's the etiquette for this kind of situation? I think he's done a
>>>> sterling job maintaining a really useful package; I wanted to help and
>>>> contribute to the community but if he's not doing it anymore how
>>>> can anyone
>>>> get their improvements / bug fixes into circulation?
>>> xtable's DESCRIPTION file says
>>>
>>> License:            GPL (>= 2)
>>>
>>> so go ahead in case you do not get a response.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>> Uwe Ligges
>>
>>       xtable has a long list of reverse depends, imports, suggests
>> and enhances, so many people clearly think it's useful.
>>
>>
>>        My preference is to encourage the maintainer(s) to migrate the
>> project to R-Forge where others can help maintain it and add
> [...]
>
> AFAIK xtable was also there available, but looking it up via search function
> it seems not to be the case.
> So I may have mixed up it with a different package... hmhhh ah, I think it
> was zoo-package. Hmhh, yes, I think zoo... and the r-forge zoo-package allows
> rollapply() also on any data type, wheras the older r-cran zoo only allowed
> rollapply() to zoo-dataytpe (at lkeast at that time when I compared both packages).
>
>
> If Rforge is the devel-hosting platform, but R-CRAN is the platform where packages
> should be downloadet from (at least it seems to be the default for install),
> then from time to time packages should be copied to R-CRAN, so that there the
> progress one day will pop up - maybe with a delay, and only hosting well tested
> packages.

Exactly:  R-Forge -> (log in and select a package for which you are a 
maintainer or admin) -> "R packages" -> "[Submit this package to CRAN]" 
->  (answer the questions) -> submit --- but only when you feel the new 
version is ready.


Spencer
>
> Something like "testing" and "stable" in Debian's distribution concept
> for the R-packages.
>
> It seems the R-Forge issue is not so well known.
>
> First time when I heard of R-forge is some months ago,
> and it was via #R channel on freenode, which I also can
> recommend for fast communication.
>
>
> Ciao,
>     Oliver


-- 
Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
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