In a recent email to the Rcpp and lme4 mailing lists, Doug Bates announced that was turning away from R, Rcpp, lme4 and hence also RcppEigen for which he had been both the primary author and maintainer.

This is huge loss for the R community. I have known Doug since the 1990s. He has been a fairly central figure around R during all those years in which I got more and more involved with R. I have learned a lot from him, and enjoyed the work together—initially on the Debian R package (which I took over from him), and all the way to joint work on Rcpp and RcppEigen, including our JSS paper. I am certain to miss him around R.

Now, in order to keep RcppEigen viable within CRAN and the R ecosystem, I have offered to maintain it. A first new upload is now on CRAN (and I also uploaded it to Debian where I started to maintain it too as a depedency for lme4). I have also started to make a few minor changes such as tightening Suggests: a little, and editing a few descriptive files. Details are in the Github repo.

Questions, comments etc about RcppEigen should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.