Help maintain packages currently held by the CRAN team

[llrs]

The CRAN team is looking for maintainers of at least 2 packages they maintain.
Lifting that burden might help them focus in other tasks, some of which might be those we have been discussing.

[hadley]

Let me ask around my team.

[llrs]

At our meeting today, we had a productive discussion about the impact of packages maintained by CRAN. Taking maintainership of those package is seen as challenging for junior developers to maintain such complex codebase. As a working group, we agreed to start by examining the package's dependencies and assessing how its deprecation would affect users and other packages that rely on it.

To ensure the smooth transition of users to alternative packages, we discussed a few potential actions that our group could take, including deciding on a threshold of top X or top Y% packages and assisting with the update to a more modern package. Once we've identified these crucial packages and they are updated to use the replacements, we can work towards transitioning away from deprecated packages in a coordinated manner to minimize friction between packages and with the CRAN checks. We agreed that a reasonable timeline for the transition would be within 2-5 years.

As a next step, I offered to present a detailed analysis of the dependencies and potential replacement packages at our next meeting/month.

[llrs]

I don't seem to be able to join the meeting with the link I have, I prepared some analysis in my blog. HTH