R-Hub, which was originally conceived as a useful tool for R package developers to build and test R packages on a variety of platforms, was the first project funded by the R Consortium. The initial version was released in June 2016. Now that the capabilities of R-Hub have progressed well beyond the proof of concept stage, the R Consortium is looking for ideas from the R community on how we can make it and even more useful for R users.
We would like to know how you think we could improve existing functionality and what new features you would like to see. So far, we have come up with the following list of future goals for R-Hub. We welcome comments and suggestions:
- Enable organizations to deploy repositories and build infrastructure locally for use in controlled corporate environments.
- Provide a system to manage source code, builds, and binary packages in a repository that offers confidence and trust to R users.
- Enable end-users to use packages with confidence by providing tools to assess code pedigree, license, quality, security, and package maintenance for individual packages.
- Encourage and enable package developers to provide metadata for their packages to help end users discover packages.
- Provide package authors and maintainers a broad testing matrix that works on multiple architectures, operating systems, and R runtime engines.
- Provide package developers with feedback required to assess and ensure broad compatibility for their packages.
We would very much appreciate comments on this vision for future development along with your assessment of the current system, including your answers to such questions as:
- What value does R Hub provide you today?
- What does R Hub not do well?
- What other aspects of package development should R Hub add?
- How could R Hub best serve the corporate package development, deployment, and management process?
- Is there anything that CRAN isn’t providing that you would like to have?
Please send your comments to the following email address: isc@r-consortium.com
Note that you may try R-Hub here.