A message to the community

[chainsawriot]

As you might notice, leeper/rio got redirected to here. That's because Thomas transferred the repo as well as the maintainership of rio to me. I am now the maintainer of rio. But this is not my first time. Back when I created rio in 2013, the package was not as popular as it is now. As some have said that maintaining open source software is "free as in puppies". I would like to take this opportunity to thank Thomas for taking care of this puppy for so many years.

The short term goal for me is to prepare a maintenance release to CRAN in the coming days #306 . I will also attend to your many bug reports and feature requests. However, please note that I will focus on bug fixes and I need to take a relative conservative approach to all your feature requests. Due to many reverse dependencies, I probably will not introduce any breaking changes. Also, introducing new formats would also increase the (human) cost for maintenance. I might come up with a new approach to manage this complexity. But in the meantime, I will be very selective about introducing new formats. Our goal should be fostering the core functionalities of rio: importing and exporting rectangular data.

Coincidentally, today marks the 10th anniversary of the first CRAN release of rio. I would like to thank all of you for choosing rio, as well as all the contributors for making rio easy and fun to use. Last but not least, and once again, Thomas Leeper for his work on this package.