[R-pkg-devel] Changing a package's name

[Dason Kurkiewicz]

Hi David,

Honestly I'm from the US and know about the scandal with Cosby but
don't think that it would be an issue for your package.  First off
it's the name of the fictional family - not Bill Cosby's name
directly. There are more members of the family than just what Bill
portrayed.  If you show me anybody that sees your package name and
says something like "well I guess that author is for sexual assault"
then I doubt they're really thinking at a capacity to do any sort of
real work anyways.  There are other "Huxtable"s that exist by the way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Louise_Huxtable is a prime example
that comes to mind for me.  A quote from Carter Wiseman: "Huxtable's
insistence on intellectual rigor and high design standards made her
the conscience of the national architectural community".  That doesn't
seem like a bad person to have an association with if you ask me.

Changing the package's name seems to be much too high of a cost (if
even possible) to shake the extremely loose association one might see
the package having with Bill Cosby.  It's not like you called your
package "ISIS". I would highly recommend just not worrying about it.

-Dason Kurkiewicz

On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 7:46 PM, Fox, John <jfox at mcmaster.ca> wrote:
> Dear David,
>
> No one at CRAN has responded yet, so I'll take a stab at it.
>
> First, you're right about the resonance of "huxtable" for North Americans, and if the package were mine, I'd be slightly embarrassed about the name.
>
> CRAN generally will not allow you to rename a package, for several obvious reasons: For example, packages that depend on yours would break (but there don't appear to be any yet), users might be confused, and there would be a discontinuity in archived versions of the package. See <https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2013-August/067264.html> for a comment by one of the CRAN maintainers about renaming packages.
>
> You could, however, ask the CRAN maintainers for a dispensation, explaining the reason for the desired change.
>
> Best,
>  John
>
> -----------------------------
> John Fox, Professor
> McMaster University
> Hamilton, Ontario
> Canada L8S 4M4
> web: socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: R-package-devel [r-package-devel-bounces at r-project.org] on behalf of David Hugh-Jones [davidhughjones at gmail.com]
> Sent: June 11, 2017 9:51 AM
> To: R package devel
> Subject: [R-pkg-devel] Changing a package's name
>
> Hello all,
>
> A short while ago I released the "huxtable" package for writing HTML and
> LaTeX tables:
> https://www.github.com/hughjonesd/huxtable
>
> The name seemed cute to me, but I later found out that to Americans it has
> special associations. The Huxtables were the family in the Cosby show. That
> would be fine, except that Bill Cosby is now on trial for one case of rape,
> and there are accusations of many other cases.
>
> So, two questions:
>
> * Do you think I should change the name?
>
> Comments welcome from Americans and others on this difficult cultural issue.
>
> * If I do, what's the best and least disruptive way to do it? Bear in mind
> that I have a couple of thousand users.
>
> My first thought would be to release an update which gives a warning about
> the future change when the package is loaded; then release a package with
> the new name and continue development on this branch.
>
> David
>
>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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