Support for R and CRAN

atripp

Thanks, noted :)

There was more demand for RPM/Yum packages, so we recently added those. Now, we are focusing on ProGet 5.3, so perhaps after that we can reconsider this --- if we get more community interest that will go a long way.... so if anyone elee is reading these and interested, let us know.

olivier

Would you have any feedback about your latest POC ?

Thanks :)

apxltd

@olivier we're mostly still looking for insight/answers into the questions @gdivis had asked, so if you can help on this we could at least move the ball forward

@gdivis said in Support for R and CRAN:

ProGet typically needs to understand versioning rules for packages (to show which is the latest, to do retention policies, etc). From what I've gathered, CRAN uses 2 or more integers separated by dots. Does anyone know if that's required universally, or if it's just a convention?

CRAN doesn't appear to have a server-side repository API, instead just exposing a list of packages using HTML. Is my understanding correct here?

Submitting a package to CRAN looks like it's only done manually using a form here. Is that right, or is there some other automated mechanism that is used?

miles.waller_2091

Hi

1 - Here's some info on the version numbers: http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/description.html#version. 2 integers separated by dots or dashes is the minimum length, but can be up to 4. There's also the

Yes, it doesn't have a queryable API, just uses static assets. It doesn't need to build any html though (thats just for humans): it builds out a static package list by concatenating the individual files within each package, and that could be done dynamically.
That's right. There is devtools::release() but it looks like that only works for cran, so I think there's no consensus about a generic upload method. OTOH, once built its just a zip file so crafting the R to send it off over http is not hard.

atripp

Thanks @miles-waller_2091 ; we're heads-down in 5.3 now, so after that we'll be able to resume investigating this. Perhaps May/June? In the meantime, if more people can volunteer to help test, we'll be able to get this going rather quickly :)

entro_4370

Hi! Any news on R-support in ProGet? There seems to be quite a demand! As a Data Engineer in a large government that bases its package management on ProGet i feel that there is a clear gap here...

atripp

@entro_4370 said in Support for R and CRAN:

Hi! Any news on R-support in ProGet? There seems to be quite a demand! As a Data Engineer in a large government that bases its package management on ProGet i feel that there is a clear gap here...

I'm afraid it's still not on our roadmap, based on our research. Here's how we evaluate this sort of things.

At first, what's the market demand outside of existing users? We didn't find much opportunity to attract data engineers (or their bosses, who would buy software) who aren't already using ProGet (or a competing product) to use a private repository instead of CRAN directly. It's just not big discussion of R/CRAN community, unlike other package types.

And then, we surveyed/asked users. But we phrase it like this: how much more would you pay for ProGet it if it had this feature, because this is an honest assessment of "how much more value would this feature bring to you" (which is what we want to decide).

Unfortunately everyone we asked said, "it's a nice to have, but we would actually pay X% more if ProGet had feature X instead."

Anyways still something we want to do, but we want to make features that bring most value to most people at first...

of course if you have insights on this please let us know! Cheers.

entro_4370

@atripp Any news on CRAN-support? I can see that it is displayed as a coming feature under feeds/Developer libraries?!

atripp

Hi @entro_4370,

I'm afraid not... seems this thread has been a little quiet.

We haven't had many enterprise customers or sales leads requesting it as a feature, and we didn't see a good way to market the feature. It seems very few people search for CRAN-related topics or wanting private repository

Best,
Alana

entro_4370

@atripp Maybe it's because resources such as https://packagemanager.rstudio.com/client/#/repos/2/packages exist then.. Or could it be that almost no one runs [R] in on-prem production? Difficult knowing exact reasons..

atripp

@entro_4370 we are definitely seeing "package" interest from "data science" teams inside of large organizations, but it seems they're more Python users instead of R users ‍️

mrbill

Hi!
Status Quo here @atripp?
I'm working in a governmental authority where R is frequently used and we use ProGet for package repos. For us, a CRAN feed-type in ProGet would be VERY welcome. Currenlty we have no way to handle R-packages internally in a good way.
If R/CRAN support is still somewhere on your backlog we would be glad to help you guys with whatever we can =)

apxltd

Hey @mrbill and all,

We've since had a handful of "mentions" for it on the presales side, but it was more like a "wishlist" than anything else. There's probably some opportunity however - so I'm leaning towards re-evaluating for v2023.

Big thing will be partners who can show us how to use R -- I added this to our internal list for the v2023 review :)

Cheers,

Alex

mrbill

@apxltd Thanks for the update!

Ok we keep our fingers crossed that you can look into this during 2023.

Please let us know if we can be of any help!

Regards
Magnus

apxltd

@mrbill @entro_4370 CRAN (R) feeds have arrived

https://blog.inedo.com/inedo/introducing-cran-feeds-in-proget/

apxltd

@valeon @miles-waller_2091 @olivier @It-purchasing_9924 @entro_4370

Took a bit, but CRAN (R) feeds have arrived

https://blog.inedo.com/inedo/introducing-cran-feeds-in-proget/