[R] how to deal with deprecated functions

[Néstor Toledo]

Ok I understand. I wasn't intended to look as complaining, sorry.

 It was interesting to get the pointview of a developer (thanks JC Nash).
To code a new package comprising useful but deprecated functions is a very
good advice, thanks, I will try to hone my coding skills to do so (and to
be more involved with the R community as well).

Thanks again for your feedback



Dr. Néstor Toledo
División Paleontología Vertebrados
ntoledo using fcnym.unlp.edu.ar
Unidades de Investigación Anexo Museo FCNyM-UNLP
Av. 60 y 122 B1900FWA (B1906CXT) La Plata, Argentina
Tel. 54 221 422 8451 int 115 of 115
http://sedici.unlp.edu.ar/handle/10915/55101

El jue., 5 de dic. de 2019 14:16, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com>
escribió:

> On 04/12/2019 2:07 p.m., Nestor Toledo wrote:
> > Hello everyone, even I'm not fluent in coding, R has become a
> > fundamental part of my daily work as a researcher and I'm very much
> > grateful for such a wonderful, open tool. However, I have faced in many
> > opportunities the problems associated with updates/upgrades of packages.
> > Frequently packages developers modify command syntax or directly
> > deprecate entire functions. This becomes a nuisance, since I must to
> > recode my scripts partially or totally, or even search for alternative
> > functions in other packages. Is there any solution to this, other than
> > skip updates or keeping old versions installed in a different folder?
> > Could be acceptable ask developers to do not deprecate functions but
> > keep them as "legacy" ones or similar?
> >
> > Thanks in advance and I apologize for my deficient English grammar
> >
>
> As Rui said, there's no easy way to prevent this.  In my experience,
> most maintainers are quite willing to avoid changes that cause problems,
> or help users to work around them:  but they have to know that problems
> were caused.
>
> The easiest way to do this is to share your own code by putting it in a
> package on CRAN with sufficient tests to detect problems.  When a
> package maintainer submits a package update, CRAN checks that all
> "revdeps" (i.e. reverse dependencies, packages that depend on the
> updated one) still pass their tests.  The submitter is asked to contact
> the maintainers of the other packages to resolve any new problems.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>

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