[tgb]

On the contrary, R packaging system is too broken for R to be reliably reproducible. No one specifies package versions or R versions. Base R has no way to install a specific version of a package. There’s a package that lets you do that, but well, you might need a specific version of it. Particularly if you need to run an old version of R for reproducing an old script it may be impossible to use any standard tool to install the correct packages thanks to this problem - the version of devtools that install.packages gets won’t be compatible with your old R but you need that package to request another version. Instead everyone just ignores it and hopes package versions don’t matter.