[R-pkg-devel] how to notify users of obsolete and new package

[Greg Hunt]

If as your install page says, there are only trivial differences in the
code that uses the old and new packages, why force people to reinstall by
disabling their code with what you term a shell?  Surely a package startup
message would be enough, and better than disabling your users' previously
(hopefully) working code.  Having a package suddenly stop working is fairly
annoying and happens all the time through the usual entropy in complex open
source systems, having that failure created deliberately is just adding to
the annoyance and is likely to impose time costs on users at moments that
they did not choose.   I have had this happen a number of times:  some
small project that I've left for a few weeks and returned to expecting to
take a few minutes to do some trivial update and re-generate a graph or a
notebook and discovered that due to a rash update of some kind (R, Python
or OS packages) that I have to spend time I don't have bringing the pieces
up to date.  Big, long-lived things, sure, they get their environment
frozen, but the transient or ad-hoc pieces of work eat time with this type
of problem.  If it can be avoided, it should be.

The dartR GitHub page (https://green-striped-gecko.github.io/dartR/) and at
https://github.com/green-striped-gecko/dartR/ does not mention that the
package has been superseded, you have to read the install page, which is
surprising given this email thread.  One additional way of letting people
know about the new version would be to put it on the github page and in the
readme.

It looks like the dartR package has been removed from CRAN due to
uncorrected errors in the code.

Greg

On Tue, 11 Feb 2025 at 08:55, Bernd.Gruber <Bernd.Gruber using canberra.edu.au>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have a quick question. I have an older package (dartR) that is now
> superseded by a series of new packages.
>
> Still we noticed that several users have not updated yet and moved to the
> new package. Hence the question:
>
> Is it okay to submit a "shell" package under the name of the old package
> that does nothing else than telling the user to install the new package
> (and a link/code how to do that)?
>
> There would only be one function which is updating some legacy data to a
> new format.
>
> Is that accepted or is there another way to let user know (e.g. via the
> CRAN package pages)?
>
> Thanks and regards, Bernd
>
>
>
> ==============================================================================
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