Changes on CRAN

The ‘Changes on CRAN’ article from the 2017-2 issue.

Kurt Hornik (

WU Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, Austria

) , Uwe Ligges (

TU Dortmund, Germany

) , Achim Zeileis (

Universität Innsbruck, Austria

)
2017-12-01

In the past 6 months, 1244 new packages were added to the CRAN package repository. 19 packages were unarchived, 55 archived and 3 removed. The following shows the growth of the number of active packages in the CRAN package repository:

graphic without alt text

On 2017-11-30, the number of active packages was around 11875.

Changes in the CRAN checks

The package check pages now also show issues found by checks of corruption of constants (provided by Tomáš Kalibera).

Changes in the CRAN submission pipeline

Package maintainers who submitted packages this year found the automated submission system accepted or rejected some packages automatically while other packages went into a manual inspection queue. The number of false positives that led to wrong rejections has been reduced. Given the system is pretty stable now, we will go a step further and also auto-accept packages with reverse dependencies where the check status of all reverse dependencies checked is not worse than before. So far incoming checks in CRAN have been performed on a single platform (Linux or Windows) only. While (incoming) checks are improved all the time, we will shortly have both Linux and Windows systems analyzing packages before publishing automatically.

CRAN received 2087 package submissions in November 2017, i.e., around 70 submissions a day. Hence the CRAN team is no longer able to respond to individual help requests or be involved in lengthy discussions for exceptions. Please really use the corresponding mailing lists such as R-package-devel (see https://www.r-project.org/mail.html).

Changes in the CRAN Repository Policy

The Policy now says the following:

In addition, the Policy now also points to a new Checklist for CRAN submissions.

CRAN mirror security

Currently, there are 95 official CRAN mirrors, 58 of which (about 61%) provide both secure downloads via https and use secure mirroring from the CRAN master (via rsync through ssh tunnels). Since the R 3.4.0 release, chooseCRANmirror() offers these mirrors in preference to the others which are not fully secured (yet).

For package authors specified via an Authors@R field in the DESCRIPTION file, ORCID identifiers (see https://orcid.org/ for more information) can be provided via elements named ORCID in the comment argument of the person() calls, e.g., person("Achim", "Zeileis", comment = c(ORCID = "0000-0003-0918-3766")). These identifiers will then be hyperlinked in the CRAN package web pages to the corresponding ORCID pages. See, e.g., the page for package ctv.

Windows binaries

Starting with R 3.4.3, Jeroen Ooms maintains the Windows base R binaries and the toolchain for building both R and contributed packages on Windows.

New packages in CRAN task views

Bayesian

openEBGM, tRophicPosition.

ClinicalTrials

InformativeCensoring, Mediana, ThreeArmedTrials, clusterPower, crmPack, dfped, dfpk, ewoc, gsbDesign.

DifferentialEquations

QPot, cOde, dMod, phaseR, rODE, rodeo, rpgm.

Distributions

MittagLeffleR, coga, hyper2.

Econometrics

OrthoPanels, dlsem, pder, wooldridge, zTree.

ExperimentalDesign

DoE.MIParray, FMC, MBHdesign, PBIBD, bioOED, edesign, idefix, minimalRSD, odr, optbdmaeAT, optrcdmaeAT, rsurface, sFFLHD, skpr\(^*\), soptdmaeA, unrepx.

ExtremeValue

POT.

FunctionalData

covsep, denseFLMM, freqdom.fda, ftsspec.

HighPerformanceComputing

Sim.DiffProc, drake, parSim.

MachineLearning

ICEbox, effects, ggRandomForests, pdp, plotmo, tensorflow.

MetaAnalysis

CIAAWconsensus, ConfoundedMeta, MetaSubtract, RandMeta, TFisher, clubSandwich, effsize, forestmodel, getmstatistic, metaBMA, metacart, metaforest, nmaINLA, psychmeta, ratesci, rma.exact.

NaturalLanguageProcessing

alineR, ore, rel, stm, stringdist.

NumericalMathematics

PythonInR, SnakeCharmR, XR, XRJulia, XRPython, expint, feather, findpython, fourierin, interp, logOfGamma, reticulate, tripack.

Optimization

ABCoptim, CVXR, ManifoldOptim, Rtnmin, SACOBRA, colf, coneproj, ecr, flacco, metaheuristicOpt, mize, n1qn1, ompr, optimr, optimsimplex, quadprogXT, sdpt3r.

Pharmacokinetics

RxODE.

Phylogenetics

treeplyr.

Psychometrics

CTTShiny, EFAutilities, MIIVsem, PLmixed, dexter, umx.

Spatial

spm, spsann.

SpatioTemporal

FLightR, sf, sigloc.

TimeSeries

dLagM, fpp2, freqdom, freqdom.fda, ftsa, funtimes, influxdbr, odpc, sweep, timetk, tscount, wktmo.

WebTechnologies

gtrendsR.

Note

This article is converted from a Legacy LaTeX article using the texor package. The pdf version is the official version. To report a problem with the html, refer to CONTRIBUTE on the R Journal homepage.

Reuse

Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Hornik, et al., "Changes on CRAN", The R Journal, 2017

BibTeX citation

@article{RJ-2017-2-cran,
  author = {Hornik, Kurt and Ligges, Uwe and Zeileis, Achim},
  title = {Changes on CRAN},
  journal = {The R Journal},
  year = {2017},
  note = {https://rjournal.github.io/},
  volume = {9},
  issue = {2},
  issn = {2073-4859},
  pages = {564-566}
}