I would be on a similar wavelength to Peter, I believe it should be more about the state of the package rather than the location.
Yes, the location matters to a degree but I think GitHub is more than well enough established at this point to consider their hosting sufficiently reliable. The most important thing in my opinion is that it is a valid package that passes a build/check. There a number of things that may make CRAN unsuitable compared to GitHub, the most obvious of which is license issues. The CRAN Repository Policy has a specific list of licenses and notes licenses outside that list are generally not accepted. There is also cross platform requirements in CRAN (at least two major platforms), which make sense for the default central repository but are by no means required for a package to have utility and be worthy of publishing. Finally, GitHub when used properly also provides a full history of changes, rationales, etc that CRAN doesn't provide for as it is not that type of hosting service. None of that is to say I think CRAN shouldn't be the default. Having the package in the primary central repository should always be the preferred option, but should not be the only option. Personally, I would accept a GitHub library that passes a build/check without much hesitation. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
