The R Consortium and the Linux Foundation are investing in a new code-hosting platform that will help streamline the development and distribution of software packages for R, the popular statistical programming language.
Titled R-Hub, the platform will offer development, building, testing and validation services for R packages. R developers proposed the creation of R-Hub in July 2015 to serve as "the everything-builder the R community needs."
A description of the R programming language can be found on Wikipedia.
(Score: 2) by gringer on Wednesday November 04 2015, @08:46PM
I've used CRAN and R-Forge looks interesting. So this is a third competitor because of NIH
My guess is that this is a competitor to Bioconductor, which is a more integrated version of R package management, including validation and dependency tracking.
Regardless of what it's trying to replace, it's the usual aggregation dilemma and will probably just result in adding another place to the mix of repositories people need to search on:
https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Thursday November 05 2015, @10:06AM
I concur that there is a risk of fragmentation of the R package world. Be reminded, however, that the number of R packages starts to rival the number of perl packages and exceeds 10.000 all sources taken together. So some specialization is possible and bioconductor is one example, focusing on the analysis of biological data.
From a developer's point of view CRAN is certainly insufficient. The submission procedure is a PITA (very unfriendly handling), the infrastructure does not allow for bug-reporting, testing, code-inspection etc. I have started to host on github from where you can easily install into R. However, you are not indexed. IMO there is much room for improvement. The critical thing would be to maintain a global index including the major other hosting platforms. I hope (but fear it's not) that this is addressed by the current project.