| Title aside, the purposed solution just - use Microsoft MRAN which did the heavy lifting of hosting archives - use date instead of version - install package automatically in first time (which pacman::p_load has been doing for ages) and easier to use in script level. It's not coincidence that most package manager solutions used version instead of date to control the environment: - A paper published on 2017 may used a date in 2017.10.01, but there is a high possibility that some of the dependency packages might be of earlier date, unless the author update packages every day/week, which is not a good habit anyway because updating too frequently will break things more frequently. - Then how can you reproduce the environment using a date? The underlying assumption that all packages will be latest till that date simply doesn't hold. That's why packrat/renv etc will use a lock file to record all package versions, and why you will need a project to manage libraries, because you will need to maintain different library environments and cannot install to same location. Yet the author take installing all packages to a single location as a feature since you don't need to install same package again, and try to avoid project and prefer script as much as possible when doing reproducible research? |