From oliver at first.in-berlin.de  Sat Sep 10 19:19:54 2011
From: oliver at first.in-berlin.de (oliver)
Date: Sat, 10 Sep 2011 19:19:54 +0200
Subject: [Rd] Is xtable still being maintained?
In-Reply-To: <4E6B76D8.4090302@prodsyse.com>
References: <1315653968946-3803657.post@n4.nabble.com>
	<4E6B60C9.4040007@statistik.tu-dortmund.de>
	<4E6B76D8.4090302@prodsyse.com>
Message-ID: <20110910171954.GA1680@siouxsie>

On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 07:40:24AM -0700, Spencer Graves wrote:
> 
> 
> On 9/10/2011 6:06 AM, Uwe Ligges wrote:
> >
> >
> >On 10.09.2011 13:26, Alastair wrote:
> >>Hi,
> >>
> >>I wonder if anyone knows if the xtable package is still actively being
> >>maintained? The last update to the CRAN was about 2 years ago.
> >>Earlier in
> >>the year I found I wanted to use the short caption option of
> >>LaTeX tables to
> >>display an abridged title in my table of contents. It was a relatively
> >>simple change to get xtable to support this. I bundled up my changes and
> >>sent the maintainer David B. Dahl an email and I got absolutely
> >>no response?
> >
> >Try to "ping" - at least I do so in this case. No response would
> >be unfortunate, of course.
> 
> 
>       David B. Dahl still has a web site as an Associate Professor
> at Texas A&M U.
> >
> >
> >>What's the etiquette for this kind of situation? I think he's done a
> >>sterling job maintaining a really useful package; I wanted to help and
> >>contribute to the community but if he's not doing it anymore how
> >>can anyone
> >>get their improvements / bug fixes into circulation?
> >
> >xtable's DESCRIPTION file says
> >
> >License:            GPL (>= 2)
> >
> >so go ahead in case you do not get a response.
> >
> >Best,
> >Uwe Ligges
> 
> 
>      xtable has a long list of reverse depends, imports, suggests
> and enhances, so many people clearly think it's useful.
> 
> 
>       My preference is to encourage the maintainer(s) to migrate the
> project to R-Forge where others can help maintain it and add
[...]

AFAIK xtable was also there available, but looking it up via search function
it seems not to be the case.
So I may have mixed up it with a different package... hmhhh ah, I think it
was zoo-package. Hmhh, yes, I think zoo... and the r-forge zoo-package allows
rollapply() also on any data type, wheras the older r-cran zoo only allowed
rollapply() to zoo-dataytpe (at lkeast at that time when I compared both packages).


If Rforge is the devel-hosting platform, but R-CRAN is the platform where packages
should be downloadet from (at least it seems to be the default for install),
then from time to time packages should be copied to R-CRAN, so that there the
progress one day will pop up - maybe with a delay, and only hosting well tested
packages.

Something like "testing" and "stable" in Debian's distribution concept
for the R-packages.

It seems the R-Forge issue is not so well known.

First time when I heard of R-forge is some months ago,
and it was via #R channel on freenode, which I also can
recommend for fast communication.


Ciao,
   Oliver



[Rd] Is xtable still being maintained?
oliver