R-forge vs Rforge? [closed]

Question

I am a novice to R package development.

I just wanted to know which one is better R-forge or Rforge.net? What is the main difference between them?

Answer 1

Neither is best, use github instead!

I use github because:

• github uses git which is a generally better version control system than svn. As Richie mentions things like branching is easier, it's easier to work offline, and I find the command line interface to be a little more well thought out

• collaboration on github is vastly superior - it's easy to fork a package, make some improvements and then send your changes back to the original maintainer using a pull request

• the servers are run by professionals and github.com is rarely unavailable. R-forge is sometimes down for hours if something happens to the server in Austria

• It's easy to do code reviews, especially helpful when working with new contributors.

• (personal opinion) The interface is clean and elegant and easy to navigate

• github pages make it easy to host a website about your package.

• built-in wiki is editable online and via git, and makes a good place for the community to contribute documentation

• The issue tracking interface is vastly superior

The only downside of github is that it doesn't provide binaries. I worked around that by developing the devtools package which makes it easy to install packages directly from github:

library(devtools)
install_github("scales", "hadley")

This requires that you have an R development environment, but this is actually pretty easy to set up, even on windows

Answer 2

R-forge is more popular, for whatever that's worth:

> nrow(available.packages(contriburl=contrib.url("http://www.r-forge.r-project.org")))
[1] 1272
> nrow(available.packages(contriburl=contrib.url("http://www.rforge.net")))
[1] 66

Update 3 March 2015: the numbers are now 1822 (r-forge) vs. 116 (rforge) vs. 6365 (CRAN). Don't know how to detect/count R packages hosted on Github (maybe that's another question).

Answer 3

Rforge.net is run by an R Core member and R-forge is supported by the R foundation, but they are both just package managers for R.

I don't see any significant differences except maybe the kinds of projects they host. It's possible that one site is hosting some projects unavailable on the other. At a glance, they seem to support the same source control (SVN), can be accessed in similar ways, and generally have similar goals.

I think you can just use either one so long as it's giving you what you want.