Changes on CRAN

Kurt Hornik; Uwe Ligges; Achim Zeileis

1 CRAN growth

In the past 3 months, 590 new packages were added to the CRAN package repository. 158 packages were unarchived, 594 were archived and 0 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 2025-12-31, the number of active packages was around 22969.

2 CRAN package submissions

From October 2025 to December 2025 CRAN received 7066 package submissions. For these, 11187 actions took place of which 8337 (75%) were auto processed actions and 2850 (25%) 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	2258	634	1643	146	0	2306	770	308
manual	1072	1	7	7	87	1345	244	83

These include the final decisions for the submissions which were

	archive	publish
auto	2132 (31.2%)	2099 (30.7%)
manual	1066 (15.6%)	1545 (22.6%)

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

3 CRAN mirror security

Currently, there are 93 official CRAN mirrors, 77 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).

4 CRAN Task View Initiative

Currently, there are 49 task views (see https://CRAN.R-project.org/web/views/), with median and mean numbers of CRAN packages covered 110 and 123, respectively. Overall, these task views cover 5003 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, 2025

BibTeX citation

@article{RJ-2025-4-cran,
  author = {Hornik, Kurt and Ligges, Uwe and Zeileis, Achim},
  title = {Changes on CRAN},
  journal = {The R Journal},
  year = {2025},
  note = {https://journal.r-project.org/news/RJ-2025-4-cran},
  volume = {17},
  issue = {4},
  issn = {2073-4859},
  pages = {325-326}
}