[R] Orphaned R Packages (maybe this is too inside baseball?)

[Jason Rupert]

Dear Uwe, 

Thank you very much for your response. 

Maybe I should take the follow-up discussion about the open license issues off line, as I have do not have a great deal of experience with such things, especially with regards to the desired licenses for R packages and the existing license for the R "signal" package or the original license of the package from which it was ported.  

Also, I suppose I should mention that I attempted to contacted the person listed as the Author, Tom Short (tshort at eprisolutions.com), of the package, but I received the automated message stated below when I attempted to contact him:
Hi. This is the qmail-send program at yahoo.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

Also, I believe the listed maintainer's company (http://www.eprisolutions.com/) or at least there website is also defunct.  

I am in the process of porting Octave's "control" package over to R, so the Bode functionality is available (no timeline for completion at this point, but hopefully before the New Year - ha!).  It appears that the "control" package when it was part of Octave was using some of the functionality within the "signal" package, so the R "control" package would have a similar dependency.  

Thank you again for your response to this inquiry, as I hope it may help with this package and hopefully others that are "orphaned".  I also look to any further insights regarding concerns about the open license issues (handled either on-list or off-list). 

Thanks again and take care, 
Jason 

jasonkrupert at yahoo.com






----- Original Message ----
From: Uwe Ligges <ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de>
To: Jason Rupert <jasonkrupert at yahoo.com>
Cc: R-help at r-project.org
Sent: Sun, November 29, 2009 10:39:23 AM
Subject: Re: [R] Orphaned R Packages (maybe this is too inside baseball?)



Jason Rupert wrote:
> How do the R "powers that be" handle packages that are orphaned from CRAN?  
>
> Recently, I was looking for a function either part of the base functionality or an add-on package that mimicked the "poly" functionality from Octave (http://n4.nabble.com/Re-R-function-that-duplicates-Octave-s-poly-function-td901174.html) 
> Based on that post a helpful R user  strongly  encouraged me to look at the "signal" package. cran.es.r-project.org/web/packages/signal/index.html  
> Unfortunately, when clicking through on that link the following is received:
> Package ‘signal’ was removed from the CRAN repository.
> Formerly available versions can be obtained from the archive. 
> 
> It appears that the "signal" package was part of those contributed to 2.8, but was not maintained after that, i.e. is not part of 2.9 or 2.10:
> http://mira.sunsite.utk.edu/CRAN/bin/windows/contrib/2.8/
> 
> I'm still pretty new to the package concept in R and how those are maintained, updated, deprecated, etc., so any insight about how this and other similar packages like this are handled is very helpful. 

If an R package is no longer maintained (e.g. if a maintainer does not respond any more when asked to fix / adapt the package for a new version of R), the package is "orphaned" and is moved after some time from the main CRAN repository to the archives.
Any volunteer is welcome to take over maintainership (given the license permits it), fix the open issues and upload a new version to CRAN.

Since signal is a package of interest for me as well, I thought about taking over maintainership already, but there may be some open license issues and I do not have too much time these days.

Best wishes,
Uwe Ligges



> 
> Thanks again for the great insights offered by all those R wonderful R users and maintainers and contributors out there.  It is truly great to see a community be this productive. 
> P.S.  For the time being, I suppose it is okay to continue to use the signal package that was contributed to the 2.8 Version until it no longer functions properly as the architecture continues to advance (which is great).
> 
> 
> 
> 
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