In the past 3 months, 485 new packages were added to the CRAN package repository. 76 packages were unarchived, 1179 were archived and 3 had to be removed. The following shows the growth of the number of active packages in the CRAN package repository:

graphic without alt text

On 2022-03-31, the number of active packages was around 18260.

Changes in the CRAN Repository Policy

The Policy now says the following:

  • The ownership of copyright and intellectual property rights of all components of the package must be clear and unambiguous \[...\] (‘All components’ includes any downloaded at installation or during use.)
  • The package’s DESCRIPTION file must show both the name and email address of a single designated maintainer (a person, not a mailing list). That contact address must be kept up to date, and be usable for information mailed by the CRAN team without any form of filtering, confirmation …. Forwarding mail from the maintainer address increasingly results in confusing non-delivery notifications to the original sender, so is best avoided.
  • Security provisions must not be circumvented, for example by not verifying SSL/TLS certificates.

External Libraries for CRAN packages now says

  • For macOS: JAGS may or may not be available. There is an ‘official’ release for both architectures at https://sourceforge.net/projects/mcmc-jags/files/JAGS/4.x/.
  • For Windows: The build system for Windows changed with 4.2.0 and only that is considered here (and only 64-bit Windows is now supported).

CRAN package submissions

In the second third of 2022 (May 2022 to August 2022), CRAN received 9860 package submissions. For these, 17476 actions took place of which 11354 (65%) were auto processed actions and 6122 (35%) 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 2559 2660 1635 0 0 2830 933 737
manual 2178 113 568 255 55 2226 595 132

These include the final decisions for the submissions which were

action archive publish
auto 2462 (25.5%) 2311 (23.9%)
manual 2156 (22.3%) 2735 (28.3%)

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

A new team member, Benjamin Altmann, joined the CRAN submission team. Welcome, Beni. Unfortunately, Gregor Seyer left the CRAN submission team after processing 5482 incoming submissions. Thanks a lot!

CRAN mirror security

Currently, there are 102 official CRAN mirrors, 80 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).

CRAN Task View Initiative

There are three new task views:

CausalInference

Maintained by Imke Mayer, Pan Zhao, Noah Greifer, Nick Huntington-Klein, and Julie Josse.

Epidemiology

Maintained by Thibaut Jombart, Matthieu Rolland, and Hugo Gruson.

SportsAnalytics

Maintained by Benjamin S. Baumer, Quang Nguyen, and Gregory J. Matthews.

Currently there are 39 task views (see https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/), with median and mean numbers of CRAN packages covered 101 and 112, respectively. Overall, these task views cover 3668 CRAN packages, which is about 20% of all active CRAN packages.