[BioC] R and BioC package installation

[Jeff Gentry]

> package managing system, due to dependency issues. I understand that 
> dependencies might be a bit more complicated than in R, but I'am sure that 
> such improvements would be of much more benefit if they would also be used 
> by "pure R". Therefore, improvements of R's related projects as 
> Bioconductor and others should also find their way "back" into R. Finally, 
> I realize that usually their is lack of people to do all this.

In a sense, they have.  People such as Fritz Leisch and Kurt Hornik (who
work hard on CRAN and (as I understand it) develop a lot of the R based
package management software) were involved in the design process of
reposTools (the Bioconductor package management package).  Also, while it
hasn't been a direct transfer of code into R, many of the same/similar
ideas are what found there way over into R's code base with the benefit of
having a lot of concepts tested to see what works, what doesn't work,
etc.  As an aside, one issue preventing any sort of direct code transfer
is that reposTools relied on S4 classes - which at least at the time (and
I assume is still the case) is not what is being used in package
management code for R.