Trans wrote:
> On Nov 4, 10:31 pm, "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <zn... / cesmail.net>
> wrote:
>
>   
>> CPAN is probably the largest and most comprehensive. I've really only
>> used CPAN, CRAN (the R repository) and RubyGems. What I can say is that
>> all three are equally good at packaging and integrating package
>> management into the language. In Perl, you can type "cpan" at a command
>> prompt (Linux, Cygwin or Windows) and enter the package manager. And for
>> R, you can open up R and type
>>
>>  > install.packages("reshape")
>>     
>
> Ooooo. Nice.
>
> T.
>
>
>
>   
Yeah ... it's about the same as RubyGems or what the Linux distros do:
apt-get for Debian, yum for Fedora and emerge for Gentoo. The difference
is that the R core team is much more tightly knit, more focused on
statistics, and much more strict on what they'll let into the
repositories than Ruby seems to be.

As far as code breaking if you kick a library out of "the repository" if
it's unmaintained or unstable, well, as a user I don't have a problem
with that. If I try something, and it doesn't work, and I can't get a
response from the (possibly non-existent) maintainer, I'll simply find a
workaround, and if I need to build that workaround, unless something
prohibits me from doing so, I'll send it back to the project.