On the Development and Distribution of R Packages: An Empirical Analysis of the R Ecosystem

This paper explores the ecosystem of software packages for R, one of the most popular environments for statistical computing today. We empirically study how R packages are developed and distributed on different repositories: CRAN, BioConductor, RForge and GitHub. We also explore the role and size of each repository, the inter-repository dependencies, and how these repositories grow over time. With this analysis, we provide a deeper insight into the extent and the evolution of the R package ecosystem.