Dirk Eddelbuettel

I am out of my numerical analysis depth here but the five-point stencil sounds reasonable. Is it (much) more expensive? Also, what about AD? Can we possibly fold that in...

I don't know that much about AD but I wrapped one simple little library in a package to test ([RcppFastAD](https://cran.r-project.org/package=RcppFastAD)). I know there is more in terms of libraries so...

As a google query shows [there is more at CRAN](https://www.google.com/search?q=cran+automatic+differentiation&oq=cran+automatic+differentiation&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIGCAEQRRhA0gEIOTg3NWoxajGoAgCwAgA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8). I think [TMB](https://cran.r-project.org/package=TMB) was one of the earlier ones.

Incremental change is good, and for a suggested package the dependency tail is less critical. (Fewer is of course still better.)

There is no urgency from our end as the functionality provided is working as designed. Is there a particular aspect that would benefit from the update? Would you be willing...

This has happened, see the main branch and very likely CRAN within days.

Coming here late but as it is related: I also prefer shell (and/or farmed out shell calls from the editor) and FWIW I have been driving rmarkdown and friends _for...

For R source packages, I prefer relying on R tools. Hence [drat](http://www.rstudio.com/package=drat) which relies on R's (existing and working) tools to build a package index, resolve R dependencies and simply...

@cboettig: Thanks for the edit above. I think this ticket may need to get split into two or three related ones. Read your headline v e r y s l...

FWIW I started to cobble together a package (for Debian-based systems including of course Ubuntu and what is used at Travis) to interface the package manager backend: [RcppAPT](http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/rcpp.apt.html). This may...