[ARROW-6337] [R] as_tibble in R API is a misnomer

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.15.0
• Component/s: R
• Labels: pull-request-available
• External issue URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/22715
• Assignee: James Lamb
• Reporter: James Lamb
• Created: 23/Aug/19 16:20
• Updated: 11/Jan/23 07:46
• Resolved: 18/Sep/19 18:32

Description

As of ARROW-5190, the R package's dependency on tibble has been moved from Imports to Suggests. However, this signature of read_parquet(), read_delim_arrow(), read_json_arrow(), and read_feather() all still have an argument called "as_tibble".

Per this comment the argument "as_tibble" is a misnomer. If that argument is given a TRUE, those functions will return a data.frame, not a tibble. I agree with Neal's comment...I think that instead of changing return type based on a boolean, it would be better for all the read_* functions to return a data.frame and for other types of operations to get their own functions.

I think it's important to consider this type of user-facing breaking change now while the R package's version is still 0.x.

As always, thanks for hearing me out!

Issue Links

• links to: GitHub Pull Request #5399