From the tibble 2.0.1 release notes/blog post:
Row names
Row name handling is stricter. Row names were never supported in tibble() and new_tibble() , and are now stripped by default in as_tibble() . The rownames argument to as_tibble() supports:
-
NULL : remove row names (default),
-
NA : keep row names,
- A string: the name of the new column that will contain the existing row names, which are no longer present in the result.
The old default can be restored by calling pkgconfig::set_config("tibble::rownames", NA), this also works for packages that import tibble .
Also some more detail in the NEWS file in the 2.0.0 breaking changes section:
My interpretation of the above is that there are workarounds for dealing with rownames in tibbles, but that rownames are sort of antithetical to the design of tibbles. I can't speak for the future in its entirety, but hopefully this info will give you some sense of how to keep your workflow robust.