Title:  Managing Huge R Package Repositories
            Problems and Required Changes

Author: Uwe Ligges

Abstract:

Managing a CRAN package repository becomes more and more time
consuming both for human and computer resources.
A CRAN repository will probably contain more than 1000 packages
in 2007.
Therefore, manual intervention is not an option and even if the
R package management system has gone a long and successful way
to support the repository maintainer, some more improvements
are required for supporting future checks of more than 1000
packages.

I would like to propose a couple of minor and major changes to
the package management system, some of them cross platform
issues, some of them Windows related.

Two examples are:
- Making the check for package dependencies faster. This is
   extremely slow (at least under Windows) if many packages
   (i.e. several hundreds) are installed. As an example, a
   database for each library might overcome this problem.
- Making parallel installations (respecting dependencies)
   and checks possible for multi-core systems. A full
   installation and check run for Windows for the CRAN package
   repository currently takes much more than 30 hours on an
   Intel Xeon 3.06 GHz machine with 2Gb RAM.