[Rd] legitimate use of :::

[Brian Rowe]

Another point to consider is that copying someone else's code forces you to become a maintainer of the copied code. If there are any bug fixes/enhancements/what-have-you in the original you won't get those updates. So now you own the copied code and need to consider the cost of the codebase diverging (from the original).

On Aug 22, 2013, at 5:03 PM, Hadley Wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com> wrote:

>> To avoid the NOTEs (which often triggers a 'pls fix' upon submission to
>> CRAN), I simply copied/pasted these functions to my package, but this seems
>> wasteful.
> 
> Wasteful of disk space, but disk space is cheap. It's less wasteful of
> your time, if the referenced code breaks in an unexpected time.  Your
> time is much more valuable than disk space.
> 
> A gigabyte of disk space costs about $0.10, so even if you value your
> time at a very conservative rate of $100 / hour, you should only spend
> an hour of your time reducing package size if it saves at least 1 TB
> of disk space. That's a lot of copies of a function!
> 
> Hadley
> 
> -- 
> Chief Scientist, RStudio
> http://had.co.nz/
> 
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