[Rd] [RFC] A case for freezing CRAN

[S Ellison]

>  If we could all agree on a particular set
> of cran packages to be used with a certain release of R, then it doesn't matter
> how the 'snapshotting' gets implemented.

This is pretty much the sticking point, though. I see no practical way of reaching that agreement without the kind of decision authority (and effort) that Linux distro maintainers put in to the internal consistency of each distribution.

CRAN doesn't try to do that; it's just a place to access packages offered by maintainers. 

As a package maintainer, I think support for critical version dependencies in the imports or dependency lists is a good idea that individual package maintainers could relatively easily manage, but I think freezing CRAN as a whole or adopting single release cycles for CRAN would be thoroughly impractical.

S Ellison





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