[R-pkg-devel] Has GitHub been used as a CRAN-style repository?

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Bruce,

As Ben and Thierry already mentioned (thanks!!) drat it pretty much designed
to support that out of the box (but also supports repos elsewhere; however
there are reasons such as gh-pages that make GitHub uniquely suited).  I have
some moderately strongly-held beliefs about how install_github is IMHO
unsuitable as a _release-mechanism_ which I think of as, say, tarballs taken
at author-chosen points in time rather then semi-randomly selected commits
you may end with.  And drat supports such releases.  We do have a few
examples on CRAN for mixing CRAN with external releases, and some are in fact
managed by drat.  We also rely on drat extensively at work for a local repo.

When I first wrote drat about a year ago, not everybody "got it" -- so there
are a bunch of vignettes, as well as my talk at useR! 2015 about.  Please
peruse, and should you have questions do come back here (or file issues at it
GitHub repo).

Chaers, Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org