[R-pkg-devel] new maintainer for CRAN package XML

[Jeroen Ooms]

On Mon, Jan 22, 2024 at 3:51 PM Uwe Ligges
<ligges using statistik.tu-dortmund.de> wrote:
>
> Dear package developers,
>
> the CRAN team (and Professor Ripley in particular) has been the defacto
> maintainer of CRAN package 'XML'.
> Our hope was that maintainers of packages depending on XML will migrate
> to other packages for reading XML structures. This has not happened and
> we still see dozens of strong dependencies on XML.

How is this hope communicated? Many R users assume that XML package is
in great shape and the preferable choice because it is maintained by
the CRAN team and r-core members.

Perhaps one could follow the precedent from the rgdal retirement, and
set a deadline.

One way to communicate this effectively would be by introducing a
formal deprecation field in the package description. This could then
be displayed on the XML CRAN html page, and when loading the package
interactively. Other packages that import such a deprecated package
could be given a CMD check warning.