Dependency management in R

Question

Does R have a dependency management tool to facilitate project-specific dependencies? I'm looking for something akin to Java's maven, Ruby's bundler, Python's virtualenv, Node's npm, etc.

I'm aware of the "Depends" clause in the DESCRIPTION file, as well as the R_LIBS facility, but these don't seem to work in concert to provide a solution to some very common workflows.

I'd essentially like to be able to check out a project and run a single command to build and test the project. The command should install any required packages into a project-specific library without affecting the global R installation. E.g.:

my_project/.Rlibs/*

Answer 1

Unfortunately, Depends: within the DESCRIPTION: file is all you get for the following reasons:

• R itself is reasonably cross-platform, but that means we need this to work across platforms and OSs
• Encoding Depends: beyond R packages requires encoding the Depends in a portable manner across operating systems---good luck encoding even something simple such as 'a PNG graphics library' in a way that can be resolved unambiguously across systems
• Windows does not have a package manager
• AFAIK OS X does not have a package manager that mixes what Apple ships and what other Open Source projects provide
• Even among Linux distributions, you do not get consistency: just take RStudio as an example which comes in two packages (which all provide their dependencies!) for RedHat/Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu

This is a hard problem.