Open
Description
Reasons to remove, deprecate, or at least just stop supporting the delphi_epidata R client:
- it is superseded by the actively- and well-maintained epidatr package
- even the covidcast R client has been documented as deprecated in favor of epidatr, and the covidcast R client has been better maintained than this delphi_epidata R client; compare:
- its presence adds dependencies and slows the build+test process while adding to docker image sizes
- this can improve the development cycle, in the spirit of cruft removal attempt #1308 and Dependency cleanup #1372
- it is fairly safe to do so because:
- it doesn't provide backing (ie, serve as a dependency) for the covidcast R client (unlike the covidcast python client, which is built upon the delphi_epidata python client)
- the only way anyone uses this client is if they pull it directly out of this git repo (as opposed to epidatr and the covidcast r client which are published on cran), which seems unlikely/rare
- according to logs, we've only had 5 non-affiliated users total (none of which were api keyed) in the past 8 months (since we made this client's user agent string identifiable).
- the changeset is small:
- one file for the client
- one file for its tests
- some r installation commands in a
Dockerfile
(this is the main thing i would like to remove (to speed up builds)) - a directive for running the tests in a
Makefile
(which becomes useless if we remove the above commands from the Dockerfile)