[Rd] depending on orphaned packages?

[Ben Bolker]

SuppDists is orphaned on CRAN (and has been since 2013).

https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_.html

 Oddly, the simulate method for the inverse.gaussian family
[inverse.gaussian()$simulate] depends (in a loose sense) on SuppDists
(it fails if the SuppDists namespace is not available:

if (!requireNamespace("SuppDists", quietly = TRUE))
        stop("need CRAN package 'SuppDists' for simulation from the
'inverse.gaussian' family")


  The statmod package also implements inverse gaussian d/p/q/r functions
<https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2016-1/giner-smyth.pdf>.  It is
lightweight (depends on R >= 3.0.0, imports only base packages [stats
and graphics]) and has been around for a long time (archived versions on
CRAN go back to 2003).

  Would it make sense to replace the call to SuppDists::rinvGauss with a
corresponding call to statmod::rinvgauss ?  Would a patch be considered?

  Ben Bolker