[Rd] Is xtable still being maintained?

[Spencer Graves]

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 
enhancements (that shouldn't break current applications) that people 
feel are generally useful.  (Not everyone responds positively to this 
kind of suggestion, but some do.)


       R-Forge also lists tabulaR, which "is a comprehensive package for 
presenting quality tabular output within the R Environment. Differing 
from xtable and Hmisc, it manipulates, formats and presents tabular data 
to any R device stream, which can then be used by any structured 
format."  So far, however, I was unable to find evidence that the the 
tabulaR team has done anything for with R-Forge beyond successfully 
getting a shell created for the project.


       Good luck!
       Spencer
>
>
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Alastair
>>
>> -- 
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>> Sent from the R devel mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>>
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-- 
Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
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