[Rd] depending on orphaned packages?

[Bob Rudis]

Or, a crazy person (me) cld volunteer to keep this running and get it back on CRAN.

I fixed the severe warning and also added C-side registration code. 

The pkg is monolithic but the C code is super straightforward (a is the R code).

Unless someone can think of a reason not to, I can submit this to CRAN this week and get the source up on social coding sites.

It looks like Jerome Braun did this for another one of Bob Wheeler's pkgs, so there's some existing precedent for doing this.

-Bob

> On Sep 29, 2019, at 16:22, Ben Bolker <bbolker using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 2019-09-25 3:26 a.m., Martin Maechler wrote:
>>>>>>> Ben Bolker 
>>>>>>>    on Tue, 24 Sep 2019 20:09:55 -0400 writes:
>> 
>>> 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
>> 
>> I'd say "yes" & "yes".
>> 
>> "Base" code weekly depending on CRAN packages (apart from
>> formally 'Recommended' ones)  is somewhat sub-optimal in any
>> case, ((but possibly still the best thing, given reality
>>        [maintenance efforts, copyrights, ...])),
>> but your proposal seems a  "uniformly not worse"  change
>> ((and I have very much liked delving into parts of Gordon
>>  Smyth's textbook on GLMs as a really nice mixture / in-between
>>  of rigorous math and applied stats))
> 
>   I did actually think of a reason *not* to do this.
> 
>   The resulting random deviates generated by statmod::rinvgauss aren't
> exactly the same as those from SuppDists::rinvGauss (same algorithm, but
> I guess they use sufficiently different internal machinery), so this
> could break exact backward compatibility for any code that uses
> simulate() for inverse-Gaussian models.  Still might be worth doing, but
> now the change is *not* "uniformly not worse".
> 
> An alternative (which would remove the dependency on a CRAN package)
> would be to pull the code of statmod::rinvgauss into R (which would be
> allowed - statmod is GPL 2/3 - but of course it would be polite to ask).
> The downside to this solution would be adding the maintenance burden of
> this code ...
> 
>> 
>> Martin Maechler
>> ETH Zurich and R Core
>> 
> 
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