When GitHub Meets CRAN: An Analysis of Inter-Repository Package Dependency Problems

When developing software packages in a software ecosystem, an important and well-known challenge is how to deal with dependencies to other packages. In presence of multiple package repositories, dependency management tends to become even more problematic. For the R ecosystem of statistical computing, dependency management is currently insufficient to deal with multiple package versions and inter-repository package dependencies. We explore how the use of GitHub influences the R ecosystem, both for the distribution of R packages and for inter-repository package dependency management. We also discuss how these problems could be addressed.