Much of the discussion was about reproducibility so far. Let me emphasize
another point from Jeroen's proposal.
This is hard to measure of course, but I think I can say that the existence
and the quality of CRAN and its packages contributed immensely to the
success of R and the success of people using R. Having one central, well
controlled and tested package repository is a huge advantage for the users.
(I know that there are other repositories, but they are either similarly
well controlled and specialized (BioC), or less used.) It would be great to
keep it like this.
I also think that the current CRAN policy is not ideal for further growth.
In particular, updating a package with many reverse dependencies is a
frustrating process, for everybody. As a maintainer with ~150 reverse
dependencies, I think not twice, but ten times if I really want to publish
a new version on CRAN. I cannot speak for other maintainers of course, but
I have a feeling that I am not alone.
Tying CRAN packages to R releases would help, because then I would not have
to worry about breaking packages in the stable version of CRAN, only in
CRAN-devel.
Somebody mentioned that it is good not to do this because then users get
bug fixes and new features earlier. Well, in my case, the opposite it true.
As I am not updating, they actually get it (much) later. If it wasn't such
a hassle, I would definitely update more often, about once a month. Now my
goal is more like once a year.
Again, I cannot speak for others, but I believe the current policy does not
help progress, and is not sustainable in the long run. It penalizes the
maintainers of "more important" (= many rev. dependencies, that is, which
probably also means many users) packages, and I fear they will slowly move
away from CRAN. I don't think this is what anybody in the R community would
want.
Best,
Gabor
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