[Rd] Why R-project source code is not on Github

[Marc Schwartz]

On Aug 21, 2014, at 3:11 AM, Gaurav Sehrawat <igauravsehrawat at gmail.com> wrote:

> R-Project is missing something important in regards to its development ,
> one simply can't ignore Github ,where collaboration is at it's best .
> 
> OR If i am wrong is this the correct R-source :
> https://github.com/wch/r-source
> 
> Is anyone thinking to bring R-project org on Github ? Maybe there might be
> some difficulty while porting its version system to Github .
> 
> Just a suggestion .
> 
> Thanks
> Gaurav Sehrawat
> http://igauravsehrawat.com


The link you have above is to a read-only mirror (perhaps not the only one) of the R source code that is kept in the official Subversion repo:

  https://svn.r-project.org/R/

There are also some documents that describe R's development cycle and related processes:

  http://www.r-project.org/certification.html

Your suggestion to move to Github is perhaps based upon a false premise, that the R community at large has the ability to directly post code/patches to the official distribution. We can contribute code and patches, primarily here on R-Devel, to the code base. However, only the members of R Core team (http://www.r-project.org/contributors.html) have write access to the SVN repo above and have to approve any such contributions.

Since the current SVN based system works well for them and provides restricted write access that they can control, there is no motivation to move to an alternative version control system unless they would find it to be superior for their own development processes.

That being said, there are a number of contributing projects that have packages on CRAN, that do use Github, myself included. There is also R-Forge (https://r-forge.r-project.org), which provides another SVN based platform for community package development.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz