On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 11:57 PM, <Seeliger.Curt@(protected):
> Thanks for replying, Francois.
>
> To directly answer your question, the difference between using base R
> functions and a library comes down to code correctness and stability, as
> well as future support.  Portions of the language, whether in base or in
> packages, which have been around a long time, or with many people working
> on them, have had more time to be tested.
>

Of course the brilliant thing about open source is that if I stop
maintaining a package there's nothing to stop you taking the code,
fixing it up, using it and releasing it yourself. You can even pay
people to do this for you.

Try doing that with a deprecated SPSS add-on.

Note this is not a hypothetical situation - plenty of R CRAN packages
have switched maintainer, which is the easiest way for someone to give
up the job of maintaining code (e.g. check who is the maintainer of
splancs...). I'm not aware of any R packages actually forking though,
with two (or more) separate parallel evolutionary lines.

Barry

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