Why was package 'epicalc' removed from CRAN? [closed]

Question

Go to the link:

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/epicalc/index.html

You will obtain the message:

Package ‘epicalc’ was removed from the CRAN repository.

Formerly available versions can be obtained from the archive.

Archived on 2015-05-12 as requested by the maintainer <[email protected]>.

But no further explanation is given. This seems like a well developed and useful packages, so why has it been removed?

Absalom

The message says it was archived at the request of the maintainer. Why would you think that we'd know better than the maintainer? Why not ask them? – Bachelorism

I just thought someone would know (and indeed Ben Bolker provided the answer). – Absalom

I understand, my point is merely that I think it would be considered both more polite and (in general) more accurate to inquire with the package maintainer first on matters like these. – Bachelorism

Answer 1

It looks most of the material from epicalc has been moved into epiDisplay.

The epiDisplay package information says:

Package for data exploration and result presentation. Full 'epicalc' package with data management functions is available at the author's repository.

(although it doesn't give a link).

devtools::install_version("epicalc",version="2.15.1.0")
install.packages("epiDisplay")
library("epicalc")
library("epiDisplay")
c1 <- ls("package:epicalc")
d1 <- ls("package:epiDisplay")

In epicalc but not epiDisplay:

setdiff(c1,d1)
##  [1] "addMissingRecords" "adjust"            "auc"              
##  [4] "be2ad"             "detachAllData"     "expand"           
##  [7] "fillin"            "keepData"          "label.var"        
## [10] "lagVar"            "markVisits"        "merge.lab"        
## [13] "pack"              "print.summ"        "recode"           
## [16] "recode.default"    "recode.is.na"      "ren"              
## [19] "rename"            "rename.default"    "rename.pattern"   
## [22] "rename.var"        "sortBy"            "tally.events"     
## [25] "unclassDataframe"  "use"               "zap"              

In epiDisplay but not epicalc:

setdiff(d1,c1)
## [1] "print.summ.data.frame" "print.summ.default"    "summ.data.frame"      
## [4] "summ.default"          "summ.factor"           "summ.logical"         

---

Edit:

Per the author of epicalc:

‘epicalc’ has disappeared from CRAN. It has been archived by R-core team based on my request. The reason is that CRAN has set up a policy not to allow any package to do anything on .GlobalEnv while epicalc does that extensively.

They go on to say:

WHICH ONE IS BETTER? ‘epicalc’ or ‘epiDisplay’

For those who are familiar with epicalc, without these database functions, you need to get back to usual plain R functions. That will slow you down substantially, especially during the data cleaning and manipulation. I recommend that you should install epicalc from our website (as shown above) and don’t borther about ‘epiDisplay’ For R users who have never used epicalc and do not want to learn epicalc database functions, ‘epiDisplay’ is straightforward and should still be very useful in data exploration and result display.

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