[R-pkg-devel] What to do when a dependency falls off CRAN

[Neal Fultz]

One of my clients has a shiny app which depends on RTextTools, which was
dropped from CRAN for lack of maintenance.

What would you all recommend in this situation? Here's a couple options I
could think of:

1) Vendor the orphaned package - we are doing this for now. I'm not a fan
of this, because then there's a mix of GPL-2, GPL-3, Apache 2.0 and
proprietary code all in one repo, and because it might encourage other
developers to write monolithic, non-modular code. At least when we find
bugs  we can fix them.

2) Install from CRAN archive instead of CRAN -  good for not having to
carry around third party code in our repo, but I'd expect this to break
with R 3.6, as the package hasn't rolled forward? Also no good way to fix
bugs.

3) Adopt package, push fixed one to CRAN - not sure what the exact process
is for un-orphaning, or if I would want to commit to maintaining it without
knowing more about why it was dropped and how much work it is to get it
passing. Eg if it were pathological solaris memory errors, I might have to
pass. Are there ways to see old automated CRAN checks on a package that was
abandoned? This approach obviously would benefit the community, but this is
probably not billable work.

4) Rewrite - I could do this, but it's probably tedious, weeks of work, and
my client may not want to pay for it; they also may not be interested in
sharing it back if they did.

5) Find another package - then I have to rewrite the "application" code
instead of the "library" code - also sounds tedious, days instead of weeks,
but more likely to be billable.

This topic has come up a few times in the past, but I would like to hear
your current opinions given that CRAN is much more rigorous and automated
now.

v/r

Neal Fultz

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