Dear Sir or Madam,

The group of people with whom I work is now convinced of the usefulness of
using R and its packages to meet our needs for statistical analysis.  It
has become important that R programs and scripts we create today can be run
by someone else tomorrow, so need to use version-control.  For this to work
well, we need to version-control not just our code, but also R and the CRAN
packages we use.  (We only use CRAN for now.)  Fortunately, R is under
Subversion, and many CRAN packages are under Subversion in R-Forge.
However, many CRAN packages do not appear to be available from R-Forge.

1- Are all CRAN packages available from some repository under version
control?  (My guess is ``no.'')
2- Is there an identifier on CRAN that flags a package as under version
control in a repository?  (My guess is ``no.'')
3- How does CRAN do version control for non-repository packages?  (My guess
is ``through the generosity of volunteer administrators'' though I would
prefer that some version control software be involved.)
4- Should we decide to create a local source repository to meet our needs?
(My guess is ``that depends.'')
5- Where might I find examples of groups creating and maintaining local
source repositories for R and its packages?

Sincerely,
-- 
Mario Bourgoin

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]


