Changes on CRAN

Kurt Hornik; Uwe Ligges; Achim Zeileis

1 CRAN growth

In the past 5 months, 866 new packages were added to the CRAN package repository. 332 packages were unarchived, 701 were archived and 5 had to be removed. The following shows the growth of the number of active packages in the CRAN package repository:

CRAN growth: Number of CRAN packages over time in levels (left) and in logs (right).

On 2023-09-30, the number of active packages was around 19932.

2 Changes in the CRAN Repository Policy

The Policy now links to an accompanying document on Using Rust in CRAN packages.

3 CRAN package submissions

From May 2023 to September 2023 CRAN received 12237 package submissions. For these, 20527 actions took place of which 14006 (68%) were auto processed actions and 6521 (32%) manual actions.

Minus some special cases, a summary of the auto-processed and manually triggered actions follows:

	archive	inspect	newbies	pending	pretest	publish	recheck	waiting
auto	3677	1889	2460	0	0	3734	1282	964
manual	2378	186	431	317	52	2423	599	135

These include the final decisions for the submissions which were

	archive	publish
auto	3573 (29.7%)	3246 (27%)
manual	2337 (19.4%)	2883 (23.9%)

where we only count those as auto processed whose publication or rejection happened automatically in all steps.

4 CRAN mirror security

Currently, there are 94 official CRAN mirrors, 76 of which 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).

5 CRAN Task View Initiative

There is one new task view:

Actuarial Science: Maintained by Christophe Dutang, Vincent Goulet.

Currently there are 44 task views (see https://CRAN.R-project.org/web/views/), with median and mean numbers of CRAN packages covered 104 and 122, respectively. Overall, these task views cover 4496 CRAN packages, which is about 22% of all active CRAN packages.

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, 2023

BibTeX citation

@article{RJ-2023-3-cran,
  author = {Hornik, Kurt and Ligges, Uwe and Zeileis, Achim},
  title = {Changes on CRAN},
  journal = {The R Journal},
  year = {2023},
  note = {https://journal.r-project.org/news/RJ-2023-3-cran},
  volume = {15},
  issue = {3},
  issn = {2073-4859},
  pages = {292-293}
}