[R-pkg-devel] Milestone: 7000 packages on CRAN

[Henrik Bengtsson]

Another 1000 packages were added to CRAN, which took less than 9 months.
Today (August 12, 2015), the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) [1]
reports:

“Currently, the CRAN package repository features 7002 available packages.”

While the previous 1000 packages took 355 days, going from 6000 to 7000
packages took 287 days - which means that now a new CRAN package is born on
average every 6.9 hours (or 3.5 packages per day). Since the start of CRAN
18.3 years ago on April 23, 1997 [2], there has been on average one new
package appearing on CRAN every 22.9 hours. It is actually more frequent
than that because dropped/archived packages are not accounted for. The 7000
packages on CRAN are maintained by ~4130 people [3].

Thanks to the CRAN team and to all package developers. 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:

2015-08-12: 7000 packages [this post]
2014-10-29: 6000 packages [10]
2013-11-08: 5000 packages [9]
2012-08-23: 4000 packages [8]
2011-05-12: 3000 packages [7]
2009-10-04: 2000 packages [6]
2007-04-12: 1000 packages [5]
2004-10-01: 500 packages [4]
2003-04-01: 250 packages [4]

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

[1] http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language)#Milestones
[3] http://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_summary_by_maintainer.html
[4] Private data
[5] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2007-April/045359.html
[6] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2009-October/055049.html
[7] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2011-May/061002.html
[8] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2012-August/064675.html
[9] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2013-November/067935.html
[10] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2014-October/069997.html

/Henrik

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