[R-pkg-devel] Notifying users of major changes

[William Becker]

Dear All,

I'm new to this list so my apologies if a similar question has been asked recently.

I'm the maintainer of a package released last year (COINr). I am working on some major upgrades to the package which will unfortunately change a lot of the syntax. I know this will disrupt the users but the upgrades are substantial improvements and the underlying code is a lot more stable and robust. Moreover the package is high level so there are no reverse dependencies, and I thought I might as well get this done as early as possible so as to minimise the number of people affected. Obviously this is a one-off and in future the package will be backwards compatible.

Anyway to the question: I would like to warn users up front about the upcoming disruptive changes. What's the best way to do this? I can put a notice on the package's GitHub page. Or would it make sense to release a minor update with a package startup message warning about the impending upgrade? Or is there another way?

Thanks for any help or thoughts on this.
Will
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