Community repository

The R-multiverse Community repository simplifies the distribution and deployment of R package releases, and it puts this power in the hands of package maintainers.

Users

Users can navigate to https://community.r-multiverse.org to learn more about packages in Community. To install a package, set the repos argument in install.packages(). For example: 1

install.packages(
  "polars",
  repos = c("https://community.r-multiverse.org", getOption("repos"))
)

Contributors

Anyone can contribute packages to Community via GitHub. After a one-time registration process for a package, the package maintainer directly controls distribution through the release system on GitHub/GitLab. Each new release automatically deploys to the repository without any manual intervention. 2

Limitations

A traditional software version cycle begins with the development phase, where bugs are identified and fixed, and ends with the production phase, which promises a seamless user experience. Community aims at a space just before production, commonly referred to as Quality Assurance (QA). This means that:

  1. Each package release has the full endorsement of its own maintainer. R-multiverse always provides a version that its developer chose to distribute for general use.
  2. The user is still responsible for judging whether a package is appropriate to use. Some releases may still have issues, as indicated by their check results, publicly available at https://community.r-multiverse.org.

Personal universes

You can deploy a package through a personal or organization-level universe even if the package also is part of R-multiverse. In fact, a personal universe may help reproduce and diagnose R CMD check issues as you prepare a package for Production.

Footnotes

  1. Caution: when setting two repositories in the repos argument, the same package may be in both. install.packages() chooses the most current version, which could be in either repository.↩︎

  2. This maintainer-driven experience was made possible by the incredible infrastructure of rOpenSci’s R-universe system.↩︎