Closed hwborchers closed 3 months ago
Hello, @hwborchers. In theory, I would like $\leq$ to be the default for consistency with the rest of the basic definitions, but I would suggest that if we follow that approach it should be a three-step process with suitable time (at least months) between steps:
In the interim, perhaps the simplest thing is to update the help to reference SuppressMessages
for those who find it annoying?
I agree with @aadler. In the long run, we should implement all inequality constraints with the same $\le$ sign. And, yes, we should clarify the help in the meantime and implement a deprecation strategy.
@aadler how far did you manage to go on your fork on this issue?
For the deprecation process, we could implement that with lifecycle.
As I am planning a release to CRAN next week, we also need to decide if step 1 of the deprecation process should appear in this release.
Should be fixed in #157 thanks to @aadler .
I am a contributor to the {nloptr} package. I contributed the small 'wrapper' functions --like 'lbfgs', 'auglag', or 'slsqp', etc. - that hopefully made it easier for casual users of the package to call basic routines without the need to understand the API of the main function 'nloptr()'.
I have a concern or request:
For instance, in the 'slsqp' function I interpreted the inequality constraints as
hin(x) >= 0
while Jelmer Ypma thoughthin(x) <= 0
would be more appropriate in the context of the package. Therefore, he added a messageThis is correct but becomes confusing or annoying when calling this function one or several times. Can we change this behavior, either by removing the message or by reversing the inequality sign?
Reversing the sign will, of course, change the function behavior and will probably lead to "dependency problems". I have just gone through this process, see https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2023-November/478539.html, and unfortunately, the added message is not an official "deprecated" warning.
I don't mind if you prefer to leave things as they are. In this case, to not confuse the users too much it would be appropriate to remove the message. (I have not checked whether similar messages appear in other wrappers.) Perhaps the direction of the inequality constraint could be emphasized more clearly on the corresponding help pages.
Hans Werner