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Show HN: Rv, a Package Manager for R

(github.com)
76 points Keats | 1 comments | 16 May 25 15:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.247s | source

We have been building a package manager for R inspired by Cargo in Rust. The main idea behind rv is to be explicit about the R version in use as well as declaring which dependencies are used in a rproject.toml file for a given project. There's no renv::snapshot equivalent, everything needs to be declared up front, the config file (and resulting lockfile) is the source of truth. This avoids issue where renv might miss information about the installation and is also easy to tweak some packages, eg install one from source and install suggests from another.

If you have used Cargo/npm/any Python package manager/etc, it will be very familiar.

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_Wintermute ◴[16 May 25 17:09 UTC] No.44007732[source]▶
My biggest issue with R package management is version pinning. If I specify an older version of a package, R will fetch the latest versions of all its dependencies, regardless if they're compatible or not, which leads to manually chasing down and re-installing specific versions of dependencies and sub-dependencies one-by-one.

Microsoft's CRAN time machine helped solved this, but I think they've recently shut it down and I don't really trust Posit to not have a version behind a paywall.

replies(3): >>44008221 #>>44008502 #>>44008542 #
1. t-kalinowski ◴[16 May 25 18:31 UTC] No.44008502[source]▶
Posit offers something similar to Microsoft’s CRAN Time Machine, but it works not only for CRAN, but also for Bioconductor and PyPI. You can add a date to the Public Posit Package Manager URL to access a snapshot of all packages from that day.

For example: https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/2025-03-02

You can browse available snapshot dates here: https://packagemanager.posit.co/client/#/repos/cran/setup?sn...

This also works for PyPI and Python packages: https://packagemanager.posit.co/pypi/2025-03-04/simple