[Rd] Milestone: 6000 packages on CRAN

[Henrik Bengtsson]

Another 1000 packages were added to CRAN and this time in less than 12
months.  Today (2014-10-29) on The Comprehensive R Archive Network
(CRAN) [1]:

"Currently, the CRAN package repository features 6000 available packages."

Going from 5000 to 6000 packages took 355 days - which means that it's
on average was only ~8.5 hours between each new packages added.  It is
actually even be more frequent since dropped packages are not
accounted for.  The 6000 packages on CRAN are maintained by 3444
people [2].  Thanks to all package developers and to the CRAN Team for
handling all this!

You can give back by carefully reporting bugs to the maintainers and
properly citing any packages you use in your publications, cf.
citation("pkg name").

Milestones:

2014-10-29: 6000 packages [this post]
2013-11-08: 5000 packages [8]
2012-08-23: 4000 packages [7]
2011-05-12: 3000 packages [6]
2009-10-04: 2000 packages [5]
2007-04-12: 1000 packages [4]
2004-10-01: 500 packages [3,4]
2003-04-01: 250 packages [3,4]

[1] http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/
[2] http://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_summary_by_maintainer.html
[3] Private data.
[4] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2007-April/045359.html
[5] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2009-October/055049.html
[6] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2011-May/061002.html
[7] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2012-August/064675.html
[8] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2013-November/067935.html

/Henrik

PS. These data are for CRAN only. There are many more packages
elsewhere, e.g. R-Forge, Bioconductor, Github etc.