West by Midwest: Package Maintenance, Transition and Handover
Talk given at the 2026 Workshop on Applied Statistics in Agriculture and Natural Resources with Russ Lenth.
Abstract
The open-source statistical programming universe is bolstered by many contributed libraries from individual, usually unpaid programmers who may lack formal training in software development. This is true for R, Python, Julia and many other programming languages. These contributed libraries have differing scopes and quality of code and documentation; likewise, the adoption of these contributed libraries also varies. Regardless of popularity of a contributed package, every package creator or maintainer eventually faces the issue of whether to continue maintenance of their library, pass it on to another person or team, or discontinue the library. For those that choose to pass their project on to another person or team, challenges remain. These include how to keep a package compatible with R overall and package dependencies (both regular and reverse), handling user feedback and bug reports, feature extension, and learning how to collaborate with a new person. For the new maintainer, taking on a legacy package of high popularity can be intimidating and overwhelming. For the original creator, one is suddenly accountable to another person, and the development process (multiple branches, timing of updates, etc.) changes. We share what we have learned from this transition and encourage the new or seasoned programmer to become involved in software development and maintenance.