Ahh yeah that all makes sense, thanks for clarifying!
Iāve put together a summary of the downstream rstan failures that will occur once the deprecated syntax has expired here: RStan & StanHeaders Downstream Patching Status Ā· Issue #1053 Ā· stan-dev/rstan Ā· GitHub
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@WardBrian @rok_cesnovar Looking at the amount of package failures that are going to be caused by the deprecation (109!), I think thereās merit in delaying the deprecation decision until RStan 2.26 is on CRAN. Given the popularity of RStan, weāre at risk of fragmenting the userbase if we remove the syntax before RStan is compatible (or even if the removal happens closely after RStan becomes compatible).
Given that the current CRAN rstan isnāt compatible, it means that we canāt start updating package syntax in advance either. This would likely cause rstan to fall behind the main versions again even once 2.26 and then 2.31 is released, since weād be waiting on package maintainers to update (or merge submitted patches) for the deprecations.
By waiting until 2.26 is on CRAN and giving us some time to submit patches for maintainers, we can start reducing the version gap between rstan and the other interfaces.
I donāt think this would be too unreasonable, or unduly delay things, given that the downstream failures for 2.26 are down to 17 packages (counting rstanarm) which all have patches merged or waiting to be merged. But it could be worth contacting Ben to get a more accurate status on the submission
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I think delaying for one version is reasonable. We anticipated this being an issue when the deprecation policy was first being discussed, but I think what we didnāt anticipate was the possibility we would actually be so close to an updated RStan on CRAN (thanks again for the monumental effort on your part, @andrjohns, I know it is a large part of that). I get nervous about āuntilā¦ CRANā since CRAN is an outside entity we canāt control, and at some point it wouldnāt make sense to wait. Do we see any reason on our side 2.26/2.31 would take longer than the next 4 months (one release cycle)? @bgoodri
Iām happy to add a delay both to make RStanās life easier and because @mitzimorris pointed out to me recently itās a bit of a bummer to have a release where the primary changes are removals. Since next version should have some more substantial features (e.g. almost certainly Pathfinder, tuples) it seems much less likely people would balk at updating.
If we can agree that one version is enough for us to have made our best effort to get RStan on CRAN I can update the warnings and doc for the delay.
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Great! I think one version (four months) should be enough, but I also donāt know what CRANās requirements are right now for the submission so would probably be best if @bgoodri could weigh in
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Docs and Stanc have both been updated to reflect the delay until 2.33
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Yeah, sorry. I was very busy this week. If Nic has time to do it Monday, that is fine with me.
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No worries! Just wanted to keep myself up to date
Release candidates are now out!
Stanc3: Release v2.32.0-rc1 (10 April 2023) Ā· stan-dev/stanc3 Ā· GitHub
Cmdstan: Release v2.32.0-rc1 (10 April 2023) Ā· stan-dev/cmdstan Ā· GitHub
Stan: Release v2.32.0-rc1 (10 April 2023) Ā· stan-dev/stan Ā· GitHub
Math: Release v4.6.0-rc1 (10 April 2023) Ā· stan-dev/math Ā· GitHub
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Hello! Where is the changelog for 2.32 release?
Is there something specific in need of testing? (I might have time to test via CmdStanR)
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Changelogs are being drafted this week
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Hey @avehtari, usually we run one or two tests ( ex. cmdstanr for cmdstan bins Custom CmdStan tarball unit tests Ā· stan-dev/cmdstanr@ab30e07 Ā· GitHub ) other than that I assume the new features ( after we get a changelog ).
Thanks for the release candidates. httpstan builds successfully.
It seems ChangeLog was not published during the release candidate phase? At least not in this thread, and not it seems the 2.32 has been released. I would love to help to test new features in release candidate, e.g. Laplace which now seems to be in the release, but without the release notes I didnāt know what is new. Oh well, Iāll test the release next week.
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