A message to the community

[chainsawriot]

As you might notice, leeper/rio got redirected to here. That's because Thomas transferred the repo as well as the maintainership of rio to me. I am now the maintainer of rio. But this is not my first time. Back when I created rio in 2013, the package was not as popular as it is now. As some have said that maintaining open source software is "free as in puppies". I would like to take this opportunity to thank Thomas for taking care of this puppy for so many years.

The short term goal for me is to prepare a maintenance release to CRAN in the coming days #306 . I will also attend to your many bug reports and feature requests. However, please note that I will focus on bug fixes and I need to take a relative conservative approach to all your feature requests. Due to many reverse dependencies, I probably will not introduce any breaking changes. Also, introducing new formats would also increase the (human) cost for maintenance. I might come up with a new approach to manage this complexity. But in the meantime, I will be very selective about introducing new formats. Our goal should be fostering the core functionalities of rio: importing and exporting rectangular data.

Coincidentally, today marks the 10th anniversary of the first CRAN release of rio. I would like to thank all of you for choosing rio, as well as all the contributors for making rio easy and fun to use. Last but not least, and once again, Thomas Leeper for his work on this package.

[chainsawriot]

As an update this: I don't want me to be the single point of failure to this widely-used software. My first thought was to submit this software to @ropensci for review and then hopefully to get included in the suite.

I did that ropensci/software-review#605 (also #317 ) but rio was deemed out of their scope.

I will give you an update in due course about a better governance structure of this software.

[chainsawriot]

As the @ropensci review ( ropensci/software-review#605 ) was failed, the second best choice to improve the governance of this software is to find another organization that can support the development of important scientific tools such as rio.

I decided to transfer this repository to my Team @gesistsa . My team (lead by @schochastics, of schochastics/rtoot schochastics/graphlayouts fame) consists of Open Science enthusiasts such as yours truly. My teammates might help with the enormous tasks of maintaining this software. Therefore, I am not the single point of failure.

To show my devotion to this endeavor, I have also transferred all Open Science tools I created to this Team account.

I will continue all the maintenance tasks here at this new home.

[jsonbecker]

I don’t have much use for rio these days as my focus shifted (and I never contributed quite enough to have it replace an internal package I developed for much the same purpose, but focused on databases). That said, I’d be happy to tap in on occasion and assist. I was reminded of this work in your 10 Year Retrospective post and realized the core of the code is close enough that I’m still quite familiar with how it all works.

[chainsawriot]

Sorry about the v1.0.0 arrow dependency debacle. #376 #315