R CRAN package is scheduled for removal due to deprecation of C++11

[joranE]

FYI, per this issue in a separate R package, the prophet R CRAN package is scheduled to be archived (removed) due to a dependency on C++11 which they state has been deprecated for 3 years and support will soon be removed. The archival of prophet will impact several other CRAN packages.

It looks like the maintainer contact information for the CRAN package is out of date and so it's possible the correct people have not been receiving any warnings directly from CRAN, hence this issue.

[laresbernardo]

Thanks for reporting this, @joranE.
I wanted to add that this would also impact Robyn, another popular Meta package, on CRAN, as it imports prophet for time series decomposition. As the current CRAN maintainer for Robyn, I'll be following this thread closely to help coordinate any necessary updates.
CC @gufengzhou

[mitokic]

Yes please fix meta team! I'm the owner of a downstream package, finnts, that relies on prophet for important production work!

[mitokic]

@cduong-a please look into this.

[tcuongd]

Hmm I'm 90% sure the build will still work with newer versions of C++. This is the only place it's specified:

prophet/R/DESCRIPTION

Line 44 in 50d3f8b

SystemRequirements: GNU make, C++11

I haven't touched R tooling in a long time, does someone know how to specify a minimum version instead of a pin for that toolchain? And I don't see any max-version pins in the dependencies, so building with newer CRAN releases should be fine. If one of you could make the change and test the build locally and/or raise a PR (to run CI) that would be greatly appreciated.

One more thing - I did try to submit a CRAN update a while ago but never heard back, which is why the README points people to install from source. Does anyone know who to contact to ensure this update will get through?

[laresbernardo]

@bletham hope you can give us a hand with this one. CRAN version hasn't been updated (by Sean) since 2021-03-30. C++11 has been deprecated and so will prophet and all its reversed imports, including Robyn, if we don't upgrade it to C++14 or C++17 if it doesn't fail. Hopefully we'll hear from you soon. Big #thanks.

[mitokic]

Seems like we should upgrade it to C++17, since that is now the default in newer versions of R. Let me see if I can spin up a PR and have the CI tests pass.

https://tidyverse.org/blog/2023/03/cran-checks-compiled-code

[mitokic]

Just submitted a PR

#2707

[hoxo-m]

For context, the maintainer of the extraDistr package—which Prophet depends on—has changed.
As a result, users of older package versions (1.10.0.1 or earlier) may encounter the following message when running R CMD check:

Requires orphaned package: 'extraDistr'

The solution to this issue is to install the latest version of extraDistr (1.10.0.2).
However, since binary packages are not currently available for Windows users, it may be necessary to install it from source.

[laresbernardo]

Thanks @hoxo-m

@mitokic @tcuongd to follow the recommendation, it must be defined here.

[tcuongd]

1.1.7 is in pretest here: https://cran.r-project.org/incoming/ I'll update this thread if there are any issues.

[hoxo-m]

This site may be helpful:
https://r-hub.github.io/cransays/articles/dashboard.html

According to the CRAN dashboard, Prophet’s current status appears to be “waiting”:

waiting: the CRAN team is waiting for an answer from you, e.g. because issues are present that CRAN cannot automatically check for, such as maintainer changes (check your e-mail …)

[tcuongd]

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/prophet/index.html

[laresbernardo]

Well done! Thanks