CRAN Task Views: The Next Generation

TL;DR

The paper discusses the redesign and relaunch of CRAN Task Views in 2021/22 to improve maintenance, community engagement, and usability, reflecting the growth of the R ecosystem since 2005.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive overhaul of CRAN Task Views infrastructure, including new workflows, community involvement, and technical updates to enhance sustainability and interaction.

Findings

Streamlined maintenance workflows implemented.

Enhanced community engagement through GitHub.

Improved content management with R/Markdown files.

Abstract

CRAN Task Views have been available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network since 2005. They provide guidance about which CRAN packages are relevant for tasks related to a certain topic, and can also facilitate automatic installation of all corresponding packages. Motivated by challenges from the growth of CRAN and the R community as a whole since 2005, all of the task views infrastructure and workflows were rethought and relaunched in 2021/22 in order to facilitate maintenance and to foster deeper interactions with the R community. The redesign encompasses the establishment of a group of CRAN Task View Editors, moving all task view sources to dedicated GitHub repositories, adopting well-documented workflows with a code of conduct, and leveraging R/Markdown files (rather than XML) for the content of the task views.