Dear David, No one at CRAN has responded yet, so I'll take a stab at it.
First, you're right about the resonance of "huxtable" for North Americans, and if the package were mine, I'd be slightly embarrassed about the name. CRAN generally will not allow you to rename a package, for several obvious reasons: For example, packages that depend on yours would break (but there don't appear to be any yet), users might be confused, and there would be a discontinuity in archived versions of the package. See <https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2013-August/067264.html> for a comment by one of the CRAN maintainers about renaming packages. You could, however, ask the CRAN maintainers for a dispensation, explaining the reason for the desired change. Best, John ----------------------------- John Fox, Professor McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario Canada L8S 4M4 web: socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox ________________________________________ From: R-package-devel [r-package-devel-boun...@r-project.org] on behalf of David Hugh-Jones [davidhughjo...@gmail.com] Sent: June 11, 2017 9:51 AM To: R package devel Subject: [R-pkg-devel] Changing a package's name Hello all, A short while ago I released the "huxtable" package for writing HTML and LaTeX tables: https://www.github.com/hughjonesd/huxtable The name seemed cute to me, but I later found out that to Americans it has special associations. The Huxtables were the family in the Cosby show. That would be fine, except that Bill Cosby is now on trial for one case of rape, and there are accusations of many other cases. So, two questions: * Do you think I should change the name? Comments welcome from Americans and others on this difficult cultural issue. * If I do, what's the best and least disruptive way to do it? Bear in mind that I have a couple of thousand users. My first thought would be to release an update which gives a warning about the future change when the package is loaded; then release a package with the new name and continue development on this branch. David [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
