I'm looking for an updated version of this: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lfe/index.html package. It seems to have been removed from CRAN. How could I find out about the history of this process to maybe find out if it was migrated to a new package or just isn't maintained anymore?
2 Answers
The package was back on CRAN on 11 January 2021. It has been updated several times since.
The page you linked provides some information:
Package ‘lfe’ was removed from the CRAN repository.
Formerly available versions can be obtained from the archive.
Archived on 2020-12-04 as check problems were not corrected in time.
My conclusions:
- as of today (11 Dec 2020), it was removed only a week ago (Dec 4)
- it appears to have been archived by CRAN maintainers, not withdrawn by package authors/maintainers.
- if we go to the page and retrieve the most recent version (2.8-5.1, 2020-07-08) and open the
DESCRIPTIONfile in the archive, we can find the URL for the package on github: https://github.com/sgaure/lfe (we could also get there by googling "lfe package github"). You can also go to the issues list on that repo to find this discussion. It's long, but it looks like the maintainers are hard at work trying to get the package back on CRAN.
Not all packages have their source code/issue-tracking lists on a public site, bot those that do will generally have it listed in the URL: field of the DESCRIPTION file.
You can probably install the latest archived version via remotes::install_version("lfe", version="2.8-5.1") (you might need development tools [compilers etc.] installed)
As Ben noted, the package has been resubmitted (I am one of the contributors) and should hopefully be back on CRAN soon.
But, FWIW and in the interim, I've created a simple package that takes existing lfe::felm scripts and converts them to the fixest::feols equivalent. I expect most people will move to the latter over time anyway, given its advantages. https://github.com/grantmcdermott/lfe2fixest
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