Software is maintained by people. While software can in theory live on indefinitely, to do so requires people. People change jobs, move locations, retire, and unfortunately die sometimes. When a software maintainer can no longer maintain a package, what happens to the software? Because of the fragility of people in software, in an ideal world a piece of software should have as many maintainers as possible.
As part of our continuous effort to improve rOpenSci infrastructure, we are rolling out a new service to automatically build and host documentation for all rOpenSci packages.
We’ve been following rOpenSci’s work for a long time, and we use several packages on a daily basis for our scientific projects, especially taxize to clean species names, rredlist to extract species IUCN statuses or [treeio](many probs with this post) to work with phylogenetic trees.rOpensci is a perfect incarnation of a vibrant and diverse community where people learn and develop new ideas, especially regarding scientific packages.We’ve also
Introduction ramlegacy is a new R package to download, cache and read in all the different versions of the RAM Legacy Stock Assessment Database, a public database containing stock assessment results of commercially exploited marine populations from around the world.
We strive for high quality in our suite of packages, in practice via a system of software peer review, and via packaging guidelines that keep growing. There is therefore a risk of increasing the workload of package authors, who already have a lot on their plate. To avoid that, when explaining how to do things in our dev guide, we recommend existing automated tools to authors.
As announced in our recent post about updates to our Software Peer Review system, all our package development, review and maintenance is available as an online book. Our goal is to update it approximately quarterly so it’s already time to present its second official version!
NASA generates and provides heaps of data to the scientific community. Not allof it is looking out at the stars. Some of it is looking back at us here onEarth. NASA’s Earth science program observes, understands and models theEarth system 1 . We can use these data to discover how our Earth is changing,to better predict change, and to understand the consequences for life on Earth.
Introduction Open Trade Statistics (OTS) was created with the intention to lower the barrier to working with international economic trade data. It includes a public API, a dashboard, and an R package for data retrieval.
rOpenSci is one of the first organizations in the R community I ever interacted with, when I participated in the 2016 rOpenSci unconf. I have since reviewed several rOpenSci packages and been so happy to be connected to this community, but I have never submitted or maintained a package myself. All that changed when I heard the call for a new maintainer for the qualtRics package. “IT’S GO TIME,” I thought.
Last month we released a new version of pdftools and a new companion package qpdf for working with pdf files in R. This release introduces the ability to perform pdf transformations, such as splitting and combining pages from multiple files. Moreover, the pdf_data() function which was introduced in pdftools 2.0 is now available on all major systems.
