[R-pkg-devel] Package Etiquette

[Joseph Wood]

Hello All,

I appreciate all of the feedback. The many examples from personal
experience really help.

My gut feeling of contacting the maintainer was indeed confirmed.

My particular situation is regarding ideas I have for a few packages.
For example, I'm not very happy with how I handled the package
bigIntegerAlgos. It has a depends on the package gmp as
bigIntegerAlgos is simply an extension of this package (it adds two
specialized functions).

The decision to have gmp as a depends really boiled down to the type
of work one would be doing if they really wanted to factor large
numbers. It is almost inconceivable that they wouldn't be using the
various tools in the gmp package, hence the depends.

Currently, I would grade the level of code in bigIntegerAlgos as
"Rookie-Level" at best and I wouldn't expect the maintainer of gmp to
associate with it. However, as the level improves and certainly before
the next release, I will contact the maintainer to ask what the best
course of action is.

Again, thanks for all of the great feedback.
Joseph Wood