As promised,here are the results: of the survey about breaking changes we ran last fall:
http://breakingapis.org/survey/ The R ecosystem stood out in some interesting ways; for example package authors in CRAN and Bioconductor are more likely than other ecosystemsto get personally contacted when a package they depend on changes: http://breakingapis.org/survey/downstream.html#mon_personal_contact?ecos=Node_js_NPM,R_CRAN,R_Bioconductor ...and they’re a little more likely to keep dependencies up to date: http://breakingapis.org/survey/downstream.html#upgr_dont_update?ecos=R_CRAN,R_Bioconductor That’s consistent with some of CRAN and Bioconductors’ repository policies. One thing we were especially curious about was how people perceived the barriers to getting package updates out due to the two communities’ diferent ways of vetting and batching updates. Developers thought that the Bioconductor community in general values rapid dissemination of package updates more than CRAN community does: http://breakingapis.org/survey/values.html#rapid?ecos=R_CRAN,R_Bioconductor but we were a little surprised to learn that neither community thinks this is much of a problem: http://breakingapis.org/survey/health.html#not_rapid?ecos=R_CRAN,R_Bioconductor We’re interested in your impressions of the results. Do the responses make sense to you? What answers would you have expected? Do you think the differences are intentional? I’ll try to keep up with comments here, or you can also send us comments through the website. We want to sincerely thank the large number of people in the R community who responded, and we’re eager to hear what you think! Chris, Anna, Jim, and Christian _______________________________________________ Bioc-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel