Combine efforts with icon package? about fontawesome HOT 5 CLOSED

Definitely yes! to all the possible actions you've outlined. We found out about (rediscovered?) the work done in icon a few days after we were well underway with this package. Once it was learned that this would essentially reproduce much of icon we decided that we would do our best to contribute wherever possible to icon (e.g., help fix issues, contribute useful new ideas).

We are actually trying to pull out and centralize those shared dependencies between rmarkdown, shiny, et al. This is to ease the burden of updating JS libs and CSS stylesheets in the htmltools::htmlDependency()s multiple times, across those packages. The fontawesome package and the (currently private) htmldeps package are part of this effort.

Anyway, the first thing I'll do is provide acknowledgements of similar packages and functions in the README. Once, we get a better handle on the direction of fontawesome, we will work toward helpful PRs for icon!

from fontawesome.

That's great to hear! 👏

from fontawesome.

Just a bit more context about why we created this package: It will be used by some packages from RStudio, so there are some restrictions and responsibilities that we're faced with that we can't impose on a package maintained by someone else. For example, we need to be extra careful when making updates to not break backward compatibility, because any users of Shiny and rmarkdown could potentially be affected. It also means that if any high priority issues come up, we need to fix them right away and release an update. It also allows us to create an API that may be different from the existing icon package, without breaking code for users of that package.

from fontawesome.

I do take that point, but I would say that it should be possible to achieve the level of responsiveness and stability you need by working with the authors of icon. They are talented young R developers, it might even be a good mentoring opportunity.

At worst, if things deteriorate, you fork the package (MIT license). I think it's important to try and work with community, rather than taking the most defensive position from the outset. Particularly over something that is ULTIMATELY not that critical.

from fontawesome.

Sorry for the long delay in responding to this. I think that you raise some great points, however, we don't even really have a good handle on the direction of this package yet (do we use web fonts? is it SVG all the way? etc.) There are many approaches we could take and, at this point, we need some time to figure this out.

I guess what I'm saying is that we're really not in a good place right now with this package to invite collaboration. I think this will change soon but we do need some time to do some experimentation and then get a solid plan in place.

from fontawesome.