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Inherit from other universes and CRAN-like repositories? #361

Closed wlandau closed 4 months ago

wlandau commented 4 months ago

If I want other R users to install my packages, I can recommend install.packages(repos = "https://wlandau.r-universe.dev"). But for people who pull packages from many different universes, they would need to find the universe that has each package and then collect all the repos together.

Is it possible to define a universe that inherits from other universes and other CRAN-like repositories? (For the latter, https://mc-stan.org/r-packages/ is one example which is neither CRAN not an R universe.) That way, if e.g. the user only needs to specify a single URL in repos, rather than potentially hundreds.

Would it be feasible to e.g. incorporate entire repositories into packages.json and look for various packages in the order the repositories are listed there? (Maybe that specific implementation idea doesn't make sense, I just mention it to clarify the more general point.)

wlandau commented 4 months ago

I just saw #212. Not sure if my post here was a duplicate.

wlandau commented 4 months ago

As @shikokuchuo suggested to me in a recent conversation, maybe this proposed inheritance feature leads to one central "r-multiverse" so users can run install.packages(repos = "https://r-universe.dev") and access any package from any of the trusted universes in the group.

wlandau commented 4 months ago

From comments in other threads like #363, I no longer thing this is feasible (or necessary for what I have in mind).