Possible Directions for Improving Dependency Versioning in R · HackerPapers discussionshttps://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1303.2140/Collected HN comments and submissions linking this paper.enMon, 02 Nov 2026 11:16:22 GMTPossible Directions for Improving Dependency Versioning in R — mentioned by chubothttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7767728urn:hackerpapers:mention:1303.2140:7767728Mon, 19 May 2014 15:03:47 GMT<p>Wow! This looks amazing. I have been working on productionization of R code, i.e. allowing people to ship their prototypes instead of rewriting algorithms in another language, so I am very interested in this problem. I have also looked at lot at R&#x27;s metadata format (CRAN), which, like Debian/Ubuntu, is very successful, despite being unsound. It looks like METADATA.jl is versioned, while R punts on that... the version constraints in the &quot;head&quot; PACKAGES file are mutated regularly and it becomes impossible to install older versions of packages with correct dependencies. This is not only bad for…</p><p><a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1303.2140/">Paper and discussion history</a>. A mention is not an endorsement.</p>cs.SE