I regret that I have been absent from the list for some time. It
happens that in the last couple of weeks I have been involved in a
series of extremely unpleasant interactions on another, private email
list that have left me with little enthusiasm for developing and
supporting CRAN packages. One conclusion I have reached from these
interactions is that I will never allow lme4 to be a recommended
package in R. I am even having doubts about whether I want it to
continue to be a CRAN package at all, as opposed to, say, moving it to
Bioconductor or even switching development to another language.
I'm sure the last option would be "cutting off my nose to spite my
face" and I don't expect I would ever do that. There are many
wonderful aspects to R and many reasons why I want to continue to use
it. But right now I find myself forced to evaluate options other than
putting a package on CRAN.