CONTRIBUTED ARTICLE 1 Possible Directions for Improving Dependency Versioning in R

Abstract One of the most powerful features of R is its infrastructure for contributed code. The built-in package manager and complementary repositories provide a great system for develop-ment and exchange of code, and have played an important role in the growth of the platform to-wards the de-facto standard in statistical com-puting that it is today. However, the number of packages on CRAN and other repositories has increased beyond what might have been fore-seen, and is revealing some limitations of the current design. One such problem is the general lack of dependency versioning in the infrastruc-ture. This paper explores this problem in greater detail, and suggests approaches taken by othe