pkgman: A fresh approach to package installation

The main goals of pkgman is to make package installation fast and more reliable. This allows new, simpler and safer workflows, such as separate package libraries for projects.

rstudio::conf 2019 programming

pkgman: A fresh approach to package installation

January 24, 2019

The main goals of pkgman is to make package installation fast and more reliable. This allows new, simpler and safer workflows, such as separate package libraries for projects. In this talk, we will show the features that make pkgman fast, convenient and reliable. Features that make pkgman fast: * Concurrency: pkgman performs all downloads, package builds and installations concurrently by default. * Metadata and package cache: pkgman caches all metadata and all downloaded and locally built packages in its cache. * Lazyness: pkgman only downloads and installs packages if needed. Features that make pkgman convenient: * BioC and GitHub packages are supported seamlessly. * Informative UI. pkgman can lay out the installation/update plan, that the user needs to confirm. It returns data about downloads, builds, installations, etc. Features that make pkgman reliable: * Dependency solver. pkgman makes sure that you end up in consistent, working state of dependencies. * Private library: pkgman's own dependencies do not affect your regular package library, and vice versa. pkgman does not load any packages from your regular library.

About the speaker

Gábor Csárdi
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Gábor is a software engineer at RStudio, working in Hadley’s team on R infrastructure packages.