[jghn]

The thing w/ reproducible research (I was an early BioC core member and have worked directly w/ its RR advocates) is that it requires having an exact set of R and packages. I know that BioC tries to do this (I wrote the original BioC package download script) but weird things can still happen. A few years ago I was tracing down a bug in some computational biologist's code that really traced down to some wacky version of a particular package which might be downloaded in the right circumstances.

In a previous life what we did was for every project you'd download a snapshot of an R environment, including all packages. That, and only that, was used for all computation for everything involving that project from start to finish. If Docker was around at the time, that's what we'd have used.

[Gatsky]

Thanks for your work with BioC, it's fantastic. I use it a lot in my cancer genomics research. Part of that involves providing a service to patients living with cancer, so your work is definitely out there having an impact!

[jghn]

Thanks but I haven't been a contributor for a decade, I just had a hand in the early days. I agree though that it's a phenomenal suite for the bioinformatics world and an exemplar of proper R techniques