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by adeelk93 1668 days ago
Breaking changes in packages is not exclusive to R, you’re right. But dependency issues kinda is?

Let’s say two competent analysts wrote some code 5 years ago and you need to reproduce it today, one in R and the other in Python. The Python code probably includes a `pip freeze` or some equivalent, but the author of the R code had no equivalent. There’s no good agreed upon solution. And I don’t think I could reasonably fault that R analyst.

Packrat seems to be falling out of favor, I should read more about conda with R.

(The way I’d solve this problem in R is with an MRAN snapshot from 5 years back in a Docker image, but that’s basically accepting I won’t be able to integrate it with more recently written R)

1 comments

I think renv (rather than packrat) is the current go-to for package management, although I haven't used it yet.