[R-pkg-devel] Guidance on splitting up an R package?

[Vincent van Hees]

Dear all,

I am looking for guidance (blog posts / books / people with expertise) on
how to split up an R package that has grown a lot in complexity and size.
To make it worthwhile, the split needs to ease the maintenance and ongoing
development.

Here are my quick reflections on it:
1. Where possible try to preserve the consistency of the original R
package. So, spin-off packages should ideally become helper-packages to the
original package and tests need to be in place to ensure compatibility of
the original R package is preserved.
2. Keep similar functionality together. For example, a function to read
files does not have to be in the same package as a function to plot the
data, but a function to adjust the color coding of the plots should be
stored near the other plotting functions.
3. Try to isolate external dependencies. For example, if dependency Y
changes I ideally only have to worry about updating one of my R packages to
it instead of several.

I am wondering whether anyone else has ever made a more elaborate mapping
of do's and don'ts when it comes to splitting up an R package or any
software for that matter?

Vincent

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