mctq 0.1.0 (2021-11-03)

• First mctq release. 🎉 (awaiting for CRAN approval)
• Now on CRAN! You can install mctq with install.packages("mctq"). (awaiting for CRAN approval)
• We decided to wait for a little while before releasing a 1.0.0 (stable) mctq version. We don’t intend to make any breaking changes, but we think is better to wait and see if the user community don’t have any issues with the features.

Minor improvements and fixes

• Some parts of the documentation were updated.

mctq 0.0.0.9002

• mctq is now a peer-reviewed package by @ropensci! 🎉
• The package repository was transferred to the @ropensci organization. All links related to mctq have been changed. Old links have a redirect protocol to point to the new repository and new website.

mctq 0.0.0.9001

• @jonkeane was added as a reviewer (‘rev’).
• @leocadio-miguel was added as a reviewer (‘rev’).

Breaking changes

• assign_date() now returns only Interval objects.
• convert() and all convert_*() functions were removed. See a dedicated note about this below.
• The ms() function was renamed to msl(). See a dedicated note about this below.
• The sd() function was renamed to sdu(). See a dedicated note about this below.
• shortest_interval() was renamed to shorter_interval().
• shorter_interval() and longer_interval() now returns only Interval objects.
• sum_time() now have different arguments and was divided in two functions: sum_time() (for non-vectorized sums) and vct_sum_time() (for vectorized sums).
• sum_time() now returns only Duration objects.
• To avoid any unknown compatibility issues, all packages on imports will now require the latest version of them at the moment of release.

New features

• cycle_time(), a function to cycle time spans, was introduced.

Minor improvements and fixes

• round_time() is now a S3 generic.
• The user interface has gotten more stylish, thanks to the cli package (now on imports).
• A new vignette was introduced, explaining why the mctq package use Duration instead of Period (objects from the lubridate package) as the default object for time spans.
• Several typos were fixed in the documentation.
• Several functions were optimized.

Note about removing convert()

convert() was created considering the user experience (sleep and chronobiology scientists). Since most of them don’t have much experience with R and that time can have different types of representations (e.g., decimal hours, radian), convert() aim was to help transpose those difficulties, posing as an “universal translator” (🖖).

However, after much thought and consideration, we believe that the convert() feature may be out of the mctq scope. It can maybe be part of another package (a lubritime package perhaps? 😄). Other mctq tools, like shorter_interval() and sum_time(), could also be a part of that package (but are necessary in mctq for the time being). Hence, we decided to remove convert() and to instruct the user to check the lubridate and hms packages for parsing/conversion.

Note about renaming sd() and ms()

That was a tough, but necessary, call. Although we tried to preserve the original author’s naming pattern for the MCTQ functions, the name sd provokes a dangerous name collision with the widely used stats::sd function (standard deviation) and the name ms provokes a name collision with lubridate::ms() function (a function for parsing minutes and seconds components). That’s why we decided to renamed them. sdu() and msl() are the only exceptions, all the other mctq functions maintain a strong naming resemblance with the original author’s naming pattern.

mctq 0.0.0.9000

• Added a NEWS.md file to track changes to the package.