Dependency management in R

Question

Does R have a dependency management tool to facilitate project-specific dependencies? I\'m looking for something akin to Java\'s maven, Ruby\'s bundler, Python\'s virtualenv, No

Answer 1

Unfortunately, Depends: within the DESCRIPTION: file is all you get for the following reasons:

• R itself is reasonably cross-platform, but that means we need this to work across platforms and OSs
• Encoding Depends: beyond R packages requires encoding the Depends in a portable manner across operating systems---good luck encoding even something simple such as 'a PNG graphics library' in a way that can be resolved unambiguously across systems
• Windows does not have a package manager
• AFAIK OS X does not have a package manager that mixes what Apple ships and what other Open Source projects provide
• Even among Linux distributions, you do not get consistency: just take RStudio as an example which comes in two packages (which all provide their dependencies!) for RedHat/Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu

This is a hard problem.