This is a long and (mainly) interesting discussion, which is fanning out in many different directions, and I think many are not that relevant to the OP's suggestion.
I see the advantages of having such a dynamic CRAN, but also of having a more stable CRAN. I prefer CRAN as it is now, but ion many cases a more stable CRAN might b an advantage. So having releases of CRAN might make sense. But then there is the archiving issue of CRAN. The suggestion was made to move the responsibility away from CRAN and the R infrastructure to the user / researcher to guarantee that the results can be re-run years later. It would be nice to have this build in CRAN, but let's stick at the scenario that the user should care for reproducability. Leaving the issue of compilation out, a package which is creating a custom installation of the R version which includes the source of the R version used and the sources of the packages in a on Linux compilable format, given that the relevant dependencies are installed, would be a huge step forward. I know - compilation on Windows (and sometimes Mac) is a serious problem), but to archive *all* binaries and to re-compile all older versions of R and all packages would be an impossible task. Apart from that - doing your analysis in a Virtual Machine and then simply archiving this Virtual Machine, would also be an option, but only for the more tech savy users. In a nutshell: I think a package would be able to provide the solution for a local archiving to make it possible to re-run the simulation with the same tools at a later stage - although guarantees would not be possible. Cheers, Rainer -- Rainer M. Krug email: Rainer<at>krugs<dot>de PGP: 0x0F52F982 ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
