Can R-universe become a CRAN alternative?

[JosiahParry]

Publication on CRAN is important for a lot of organization and a lot of folks. However, over time there is a repeated pattern of CRAN maintainers arbitrarily removing packages from CRAN, being overtly rude among other things that make it challenging to be a contributor to the R community.

I believe that the r-universe has the potential to be an R package repository that respects developers and provides autonomy and transparency in the process. However, there are a number of benefits that CRAN provides that I do not think r-universe yet does.

My goal with this is to start a discussion on what would be needed to create an authoritative R package repository based on the r-universe framework.

r-universe benefits:

• Automated and transparent build process
• linux, mac, windows, and webR binaries
• package metrics and telemetry
• public API
• developer friendly

What r-universe needs

These are the things that I think that r-universe is missing that CRAN does solve

• archived versions (when a git repo or history is modified the git sha is not sufficient)
• reverse dependency checks
• documented long term support for R-universe
• message of failing checks in r-devel
• integration tests (R CMD check with presently released versions) that lead to removal if failing without fixing within timely manner
  • while annoying, i think this is the true benefit that CRAN provides. That every R package that is published at the moment can be installed successfully

[JosiahParry]

Related:

• Facilitating long-term reproducibility of dependent code #399
• https://github.com/cranchange/cran_change.org/
• https://github.com/RConsortium/r-repositories-wg

[jeroen]

It is not the mission of R-universe to replace CRAN or exactly copy its functionality. Everyone is free to run their own cran-style package repository, with their own policies, for packages that are out of scope or otherwise not suitable for CRAN. This is also emphasised by CRAN founder Kurt Hornik at UseR 2024 (all slides). Organizations like bioconductor and rOpenSci have been doing this for a long time, R-universe provides infrastructure to make this easy for everyone.

You might be interested in the r-multiverse project which is a collaborative effort to start a democratic community-managed package repository with quarterly production snapshots, based on r-universe. See this discussion to get up to speed: r-multiverse/help#78