a solution for packages on imports that got kicked out of CRAN

[LunaSare]

Packages on imports that are not on CRAN anymore, such as reports, or that were never on CRAN, such as phyloch but that we still need for datelife.

A potential solution here
https://www.r-bloggers.com/%F0%9F%93%A6-managing-dependencies-in-packages/

[bomeara]

Or we could just get rid of those dependencies in some other way. Is reports needed? Does phyloch make things easier, or is it just one function with a system call that we could develop an analog to?

[LunaSare]

I tried hosting the function from reports that we need, but it depends on so many other things from its package that it stopped making sense. The phyloch functions that we use are hosted on datelife in https://github.com/phylotastic/datelife/blob/master/R/pkg_phyloch_functions.R
With more packages dropping from cran, it made sense to try implementing the method described on the r-bloggers post to manage dependencies more efficiently.