[RsR] New maintainer? Package 'robust' (original S+ "Library 'robust') orphaned on CRAN

Martin,

First I'd like to thank you again for your work on these "robustnik"
packages, and also on many other aspects of R. It's a thankless role, but
not an unnoticed one.

IMHO an under-appreciated feature that is in "robust" and not in
robustbase is the visual comparison of different fits for the same model
(typically used to compare robust and non robust fits, but can in principle
be used to compare other fits).

I believe that, fortunately, this functionality has already been extracted
to a stand alone package "fit.models". I haven't tried it with robustbase
yet, but I believe it'd be useful to have them work well with each other,
if they don't already.

Matias

PS: fit.models, particularly within robust, used lattice plots, which look
a bit dated now. I don't know how difficult it will be to update them, or
whether it's worth the effort.



Sent from a phone

On Mar. 5, 2020 8:20 a.m., Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>
wrote:

Valentin Todorov
    on Fri, 28 Feb 2020 22:31:21 +0100 writes:

    > Dear Martin,
    > I was thinking of this since Kjell
    > abandoned the package, but I was not sure to what extent would this

be

    > necessary - most of the functionality of 'robust' we already moved

to

    > 'robustbase' and/or 'rrcov', therefore it suggests/imports these

packages.

    > Let us see in the next days what still remains there and is valuable

and

    > decide what to do.

    > Best regards,
    > Valentin

Thank you, Valentin.

I had similar thoughts a long time ago, I think prompted
indepedently by  Kjell  and Doug Martin ...

I vaguely remember I found that there have been things in
'Robust' which looked valuable and notably good to have for
comparison reasons,
*but* that were a lot work to "tear out" of the robust package
(including the necessary underlying Fortran code, but *not*
taking all the Fortran code that would *not* be needed ...).

In the mean time the CRAN team has archived the package
'robust', and  I must adapt the 'Robustness' CRAN task view
considerably (and remove the 'Suggests: robust'  from my
robustbase package.

I'd be grateful for help and suggestions in still trying
'salvage' valuable resources out of 'robust'.

BTW:  Why has  rrcovNA  be archived?

Best,
Martin

    > On Fri, 28 Feb 2020, 11:03 am Martin Maechler, <

maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>

    > wrote:

    >> Dear R Robustniks,
    >>
    >> as I am the maintainer of package 'robustbase' and am submitting
    >> a new version of it to CRAN,
    >> it came to my knowledge that package 'robust' (= the original
    >> S-plus "Library 'robust', then released to CRAN, maintained by
    >> Kjell Konis for time) has been orphaned on CRAN relatively
    >> recently.
    >> As I have 'robust' among the 'Suggests: ' entries of "my"
    >> package 'robustbase' I now get a  NOTE   about suggesting an
    >> orphaned package.
    >> I've been formally a co-author of that package (togeth
    >>
    >> I personally would think it to be a loss for the "robustnik
    >> community" if this package would not remain easily available
    >> (notably on Windows, also the Mac where most people cannot
    >> install package from the source but are used to install the
    >> binary built package from CRAN).
    >>
    >> Are some you willing and capable to become the maintainer of
    >> 'robust' (with the perspective to do this for a couple of years)?
    >>
    >> Best,
    >> Martin