[Rd] [RFC] A case for freezing CRAN

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Piling on:

On 19 March 2014 at 07:52, Joshua Ulrich wrote:
| There is nothing preventing you (or anyone else) from creating
| repositories that do what you suggest.  Create a CRAN mirror (or more
| than one) that only include the package versions you think they
| should.  Then have your production servers use it (them) instead of
| CRAN.
| 
| Better yet, make those repositories public.  If many people like your
| idea, they will use your new repositories instead of CRAN.  There is
| no reason to impose this change on all world-wide CRAN users.

On 19 March 2014 at 08:52, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
| I don't see why CRAN needs to be involved in this effort at all.  A 
| third party could take snapshots of CRAN at R release dates, and make 
| those available to package users in a separate repository.  It is not 
| hard to set a different repository than CRAN as the default location 
| from which to obtain packages.
| 
| The only objection I can see to this is that it requires extra work by 
| the third party, rather than extra work by the CRAN team. I don't think 
| the total amount of work required is much different.  I'm very 
| unsympathetic to proposals to dump work on others.


And to a first approximation some of those efforts already exist:

  -- 200+ r-cran-* packages in Debian proper

  -- 2000+ r-cran-* packages in Michael's c2d4u (via launchpad)

  -- 5000+ r-cran-* packages in Don's debian-r.debian.net

The only difference here is that Jeroen wants to organize source packages.
But that is just a matter of stacking them in directory trees and calling

    setwd("/path/to/root/of/your/repo/version")
    tools::write_PACKAGES(".", type="source")'

to create PACKAGES and PACKAGES.gz.

Dirk

-- 
Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com