depending on orphaned packages?
On 2019-09-25 3:26 a.m., Martin Maechler wrote:
Ben Bolker
on Tue, 24 Sep 2019 20:09:55 -0400 writes:
> SuppDists is orphaned on CRAN (and has been since 2013).
> https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_.html
> Oddly, the simulate method for the inverse.gaussian family
> [inverse.gaussian()$simulate] depends (in a loose sense) on SuppDists
> (it fails if the SuppDists namespace is not available:
> if (!requireNamespace("SuppDists", quietly = TRUE))
> stop("need CRAN package 'SuppDists' for simulation from the
> 'inverse.gaussian' family")
> The statmod package also implements inverse gaussian d/p/q/r functions
> <https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2016-1/giner-smyth.pdf>. It is
> lightweight (depends on R >= 3.0.0, imports only base packages [stats
> and graphics]) and has been around for a long time (archived versions on
> CRAN go back to 2003).
> Would it make sense to replace the call to SuppDists::rinvGauss with a
> corresponding call to statmod::rinvgauss ? Would a patch be considered?
> Ben Bolker
I'd say "yes" & "yes".
"Base" code weekly depending on CRAN packages (apart from
formally 'Recommended' ones) is somewhat sub-optimal in any
case, ((but possibly still the best thing, given reality
[maintenance efforts, copyrights, ...])),
but your proposal seems a "uniformly not worse" change
((and I have very much liked delving into parts of Gordon
Smyth's textbook on GLMs as a really nice mixture / in-between
of rigorous math and applied stats))
I did actually think of a reason *not* to do this. The resulting random deviates generated by statmod::rinvgauss aren't exactly the same as those from SuppDists::rinvGauss (same algorithm, but I guess they use sufficiently different internal machinery), so this could break exact backward compatibility for any code that uses simulate() for inverse-Gaussian models. Still might be worth doing, but now the change is *not* "uniformly not worse". An alternative (which would remove the dependency on a CRAN package) would be to pull the code of statmod::rinvgauss into R (which would be allowed - statmod is GPL 2/3 - but of course it would be polite to ask). The downside to this solution would be adding the maintenance burden of this code ...
Martin Maechler ETH Zurich and R Core