[R] valid package repositories

Jordan J jordandev678 at gmail.com
Mon Oct 2 22:01:46 CEST 2017


I would be on a similar wavelength to Peter, I believe it should be
more about the state of the package rather than the location.

Yes, the location matters to a degree but I think GitHub is more than
well enough established at this point to consider their hosting
sufficiently reliable.
The most important thing in my opinion is that it is a valid package
that passes a build/check.

There a number of things that may make CRAN unsuitable compared to
GitHub, the most obvious of which is license issues.
The CRAN Repository Policy has a specific list of licenses and notes
licenses outside that list are generally not accepted.
There is also cross platform requirements in CRAN (at least two major
platforms), which make sense for the default central repository but
are by no means required for a package to have utility and be worthy
of publishing.
Finally, GitHub when used properly also provides a full history of
changes, rationales, etc that CRAN doesn't provide for as it is not
that type of hosting service.

None of that is to say I think CRAN shouldn't be the default. Having
the package in the primary central repository should always be the
preferred option, but should not be the only option.
Personally, I would accept a GitHub library that passes a build/check
without much hesitation.



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