Competing with one's own work

Ravi Varadhan <rvaradhan <at> jhmi.edu> writes:

"The decision about whether it belongs in a package or in base R is 
about who should maintain the code."  

Ok.  I understand it now.

Thanks,
Ravi.

A point that may not have been made (sorry if it was and I missed it):

A better question might be how packages get added to the *recommended*
package list (rather than how code gets added to "base R").  Of the
16 recommended packages, 2 are maintained by R-core itself, 12 by various
R-core members acting as individuals (I assume), and 2 by non-R-core
people. It seems that if a contributed package sticks around long enough
and proves itself sufficiently useful and of sufficiently high quality
(and well enough maintained), that it could then be suggested as
a recommended package.

i1 <- installed.packages()
i2 <- i1[!is.na(i1[,"Priority"]),]
ff <- function(x) table(sapply(x[,"Package"],maintainer))
ff(i2[i2[,"Priority"]=="base",])

R Core Team <R-core at r-project.org> 
                                12 

ff(i2[i2[,"Priority"]=="recommended",])

           Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> 
                                              7 
Deepayan Sarkar <deepayan.sarkar at r-project.org> 
                                              2 
 Doug and Martin <Matrix-authors at R-project.org> 
                                              1 
             Luke Tierney <luke at stat.uiowa.edu> 
                                              1 
   Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> 
                                              1 
                  R-core <R-core at R-project.org> 
                                              1 
                  R-core <R-core at r-project.org> 
                                              1 
          Simon Wood <simon.wood at r-project.org> 
                                              1 
       Terry Therneau <therneau.terry at mayo.edu> 
                                              1