[Roxygen-devel] roxygen3

[Brian G. Peterson]

On 08/27/2012 06:53 PM, Hadley Wickham wrote:
> I thought I should mention I've started working on roxygen3 at
> https://github.com/hadley/roxygen3.  It's a ground up rewrite of
> roxygen2, aiming to produce the same results as roxygen3, but without
> a completely different backend.  Currently the roxygen2 code is hard
> to extend - the idea of roclets was good, but I think they were too
> big - you want to be able to work at the tag level so it's easier to
> add new features.

I'm thrilled to her that you are working to improve the roxygen backend.

I use roxygen(now 2, ick) to document over ten packages, with more in 
development, and it's a huge productivity enhancer.  Thanks for taking 
it over and maintaining it.

I'm *not* thrilled that you intend to release another package instead of 
just using version numbers, as has been the best practice in software 
development for decades.

Could you *please* talk to some actual computer scientists and at least 
consider calling it roxygen version 3.0 or roxygen2 version 3.0 instead 
of releasing a new package name every time you feel the need to refactor 
the code?  It is commonly understood that major version numbers may 
break backwards compatibility... no need to needlessly break the package 
name too.

Regards,

    - Brian

-- 
Brian G. Peterson
http://braverock.com/brian/
Ph: 773-459-4973
IM: bgpbraverock