[R-pkg-devel] What is a "retired"package?

[Lenth, Russell V]

I received a request that I remove the 'plyr' package from the Imports for my package, because plyr is retired. Indeed, the README file for plyr states:

    > plyr is retired: this means only changes necessary to keep it on CRAN will be made. 
    > We recommend using dplyr (for data frames) or purrr (for lists) instead.

This says "retired" but it also suggests that plyr will continue to be maintained. And that is a good thing because plyr has over 700 direct reverse-dependents, and almost 2000 if we include indirect reverse dependencies. 

So it seems to me that it isn't a problem at all to have my package import plyr. I use its 'aaply' and 'alply' functions, which are like 'apply' but work for any dimensional array. There are no obvious replacements in purrr or dplyr, and if there were and I used them instead, it would increase my indirect dependencies to several packages that are not actually needed.

The user requesting that I drop plyr states that this is needed to satisfy regulatory needs, that it is problematic to qualify my package since it imports a retired package. 

So my question is: Is there a specific meaning in CRAN for "retired," or is that just loose language from the plyr developers? I did not find the term in "CRAN Repository Policy" or "Writing R Extensions." It appears that my user or their regulatory agency thinks it means that it could be deprecated in the near future. (If that is indeed what it means, there are 700+ packages in trouble!) Otherwise, perhaps the appropriate request may be to the plyr maintainers to modify how they describe its status, so as to avoid confusion.

Russ Lenth
University of Iowa