'temporary' package

[Gershom Bazerman]

On 5/10/14, 1:15 PM, Edward Kmett wrote:
> I just want to say that I personally find this thread an the the 
> similar "sky is falling" discussion about Lennart being on vacation 
> for 2 weeks to be alarming and far far too hasty.
A huge +1 to all of this.

The worst/best thing about maintaining packages that people care about 
is that people expect because you've done work they rely on, you have 
committed to be on-call tech support.

I understand that Max did a bunch of very important work, then became 
occupied with other things in the world. And in the long term, that 
needs to be sorted out. But in the short term, a four-day-notice policy 
is silly. And furthermore, even though there's nothing _wrong_ with 
forking promiscuously, it tends to create a mess, to no good end.

Finally, I want to note that it is worthwhile to go and read the code of 
the temporary package. It fits in less than a page, and consists of a 
few functions that, while somewhat subtle, are each "conceptually" 
one-liners and only in fact take four or so normal sized lines of code.

Clearly, the easier path, if that library breaks on you, is to copy and 
paste the relevant functionality.

For all the concerns about package stability, we should also perhaps 
recognize that introducing new dependencies in your own code will also 
always carry a cost, and sometimes the easiest thing is just to not 
introduce that dependency.

--Gershom