unconf15 (original) (raw)

This repository was archived by the owner on May 19, 2021. It is now read-only.

Description

CRAN is a favorite topic at any R gathering; so perhaps we can channel it into something productive here.

Perhaps I'm grouping different issues under the same tent here, so feel free to propose to break these into separate issues or pursue only certain aspects of this. I'm really not sure how best to describe these issues either, so if this sparks any interest feel free hijack this issue and re-frame the discussion however you see fit.

There's a handful of very interesting packages for giving a stricter approach to dependency management: including RStudio's packrat, @gmbecker 's gRAN & switchr, and some of the related tools to which these connect (mran, @gaborcsardi 's crandb, etc). It might be nice to take stock of what issues these address and what challenges remain in managing dependencies.
The above approaches attempt to deal with the reality of installing packages whose dependencies come from locations other than CRAN (or CRAN/bioconductor/omegahat; though the latter two are clearly rather different than CRAN & rather different ways). Does this suggest that the future will be more distributed, or the need for a different approach to coordinating package dependencies?
EDIT @eddelbuettel's new drat takes the approach of making it easier for simple creation and use of alternative repositories, building around base R install functions. How does this approach (and the general ability to add arbitrary repositories into dependencies) impact with the approaches in the first bullet? (There's a question about the relative roles of install_github vs install.packages()+drat style approach, also seen in @yihui 's xran, etc here too)