Why was package 'epicalc' removed from CRAN?

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?

Solution

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 It has been archived by R-core team based on my request.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.