rOpenSci Community Call #25. Maintaining an R Package

Details and additional resources: https://ropensci.org/commcalls/2020-03-18/

We’ll start with a short talk by Julia Silge, then spend most of the time on Q & A with four panelists - Elin Waring, Erin Grand, Leonardo Collado-Torres, and Scott Chamberlain - moderated by Julia. Our panelists bring a wide range of perspectives so there’s something for everyone. Collectively, they have experience developing and maintaining passion-project packages, very popular packages, too many packages on CRAN, packages on Bioconductor, and taking over maintenance (and changing things!) of a package developed by someone else.

Moments [click on the link to jump to it]:
- 0:00 Stefanie Butland (welcome)
- 7:45 Julia Silge's presentation
- 16:45 Panel Q & A

Questions addressed:
1. What does it mean to “maintain an R package”?

2. How do you encourage user feedback and/or manage a firehose of user feedback or requests for help?

3. How do you manage issues / feature requests? What workflows do you use to do this?

4. What is a path for new contributors to R packages? How can healthy norms be passed on? (Related: What should someone do if they want to start helping maintain one of your packages?)

5. What considerations go into decisions around dependency management? APIs that change?

6. What does the process of changing maintainers look like? What sets up this transition for success?

7. How do you decide to submit to a centralized repository like CRAN or Bioconductor? Peer review like JOSS or rOpenSci? Stay only on GitHub?

8. What does someone need to know or skills they need to have to start maintaining a package?