[Rcpp-devel] Question on lme4 book

[Søren Højsgaard]

While perhaps not too surprising, it is still sad news that Doug has decided to give up his work in the R community. It is such a pitty that this Solaris-issue can have such dramatic consequences. Perhaps it is a selection bias, but I think I only know one or two persons who actually use Solaris...

I have greatly enjoyed using RcppEigen in my graphical modelling packages; if RccpEigen does not continue to live on CRAN then my packages will go away too. 

Hopefully a sustainable solution will show up :) In the meantime we are lucky to have github...

Seasons greetings
Søren


-----Original Message-----
From: rcpp-devel-bounces at lists.r-forge.r-project.org [mailto:rcpp-devel-bounces at lists.r-forge.r-project.org] On Behalf Of Hadley Wickham
Sent: 9. december 2013 20:36
To: Douglas Bates
Cc: R-mixed models mailing list; rcpp-devel
Subject: Re: [Rcpp-devel] Question on lme4 book

> Maintaining an Rcpp-based package on CRAN these days is a case of "no 
> good deed shall go unpunished" and "the flogging will continue until 
> morale improves".  I am the maintainer of the RcppEigen package which 
> apparently also makes me the maintainer of an Eigen port to Solaris.  
> When compilers on Solaris report errors in code from Eigen I am 
> supposed to fix them.  This is difficult in that I don't have access 
> to any computers running Solaris, which is a proprietary operating 
> system as far as I can tell, and Eigen is a complex code base using what is called "template meta-programming" in C++.
> Making modifications to such code can be difficult.  I can't claim to 
> fully understand all the details in Eigen and in Rcpp.  I am a user of 
> these code bases, not a developer. The Eigen authors themselves don't 
> test their code under Solaris because they don't have access to 
> Solaris systems either and they don't regard Solaris as an important platform for numerical computing.
> The CRAN maintainers feel differently, which puts me in a box.

It's not just packages that use Rcpp that suffer from this problem.
lubridate, which has extensive user tests, often fails on solaris because it does something different to every other platform. While this has uncovered a number of bugs and limitations in R's datetime support, the only feedback we get from CRAN is extremely negative.

For lubridate, in the absence of any help from a solaris expert (and no evidence that anyone on solaris uses lubridate), we have simply told CRAN that it does not work on solaris. We continue to argue that the CRAN policies only require that an R package need only work on two major platforms to be distributed via CRAN, and while the CRAN maintainers continue to push back at us, they are bound by their own words.

(While a somewhat biased sample, we see very few solaris downloads from the Rstudio cran mirror: since Jan 1, there were 845 packages downloaded from solaris, 0.003% of the total)

> There are days when I am tempted to say, "okay, if RcppEigen is not 
> suitable for CRAN then remove it" which would result in removal of all 
> the packages that depend on it, including lme4.  That may seem 
> childish of me but I really don't know what else to do.

I have been tempted to do this too, and for RcppEigen more than an empty threat. Currently the complete reverse dependencies (Depends, Imports, LinkingTo and Suggests) of RcppEigen includes 3626 packages, almost three-quarters of CRAN. It would certainly create more work for CRAN can allowing RcppEigen to fail on Solaris.

> So I have reached the point of saying "goodbye" to R, Rcpp and lme4 
> and switching all of my development effort to Julia.  I'm sorry but 
> others are going to need to determine how to maintain lme4 to the 
> satisfaction of the CRAN maintainers or whether there should be an 
> alternative distribution mechanism for R packages.

This is a great loss for the R community. nlme was one of the first R packages that I used, and I still remember taking a SAS-based mixed models course, while reading "Mixed-Effects Models in S and S-PLUS"
and doing all the homework in R. I certainly learned much more about mixed models and data analysis from you and your book than I did from that class! Your patient and thoughtful responses to questions about R and statistics have helped me become a better statistician, and have helped many others solve their real scientific problems.

While I hope that one day we can lure you back to R with better ways of distributing packages, I wish you all the best in making great modelling software for julia. The julia community is truly lucky to have you!

Hadley

--
http://had.co.nz/
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