Package scope #60
Description
Regarding the downtime of dimRed on CRAN (see #57 and #58), I have done some thinking and while R packages are easy to maintain due to the great stability of the R language, dimRed is making the maintainer's life unnecessarily difficult by doing to many things.
The scope of the package needs to be better defined. dimRed is a wrapper around other packages and should not do more than that. This means that the following things we are currently doing are out of scope:
- Numeric accuracy testing
- Including own methods, e.g. Isomap and Autoencoder.
This means I will do the following:
- Remove tests that only test for numeric accuracy
- Keep tests for the APIs of the wrapped packages.
- Move methods into their own packages and wrap those.
Not sure yet what to do with complicated python dependencies (e.g. UMAP and the Autoencoder), I will probably push the burden onto the user and provide some helper functions, see e.g. tensorflow and keras.
I will probably keep documentation around, good documentation has always been a staple of R, there is also no real maintainer burden