pak – a fresh approach to package installation

FAST

• Concurrent HTTP
• Concurrent package builds and installs
• Lazy installation: only update if needed
• Metadata cache
• Package cache

SAFE

• Fail on error
• Leave package(s) in a working state
• Install all dependencies in the same library
• Report conflicts up front, before the installation
• Put pak’s own dependencies in a private library
• Use a subprocess to perform installation
• Detect and warn for updating loaded packages

CONVENIENT

• CRAN/BioC packages out of the box
• GitHub packages easily
• Install from local package files and trees
• Support the Remotes field in DESCRIPTION, for package development
• Show download sizes, progress bars

Project based workflows

Files and directories of a project/package:

R/                # code comes here
DESCRIPTION       # dependencies specified here
.Rprofile         # library path setup comes here
r-packages/       # private package library
.Rbuildignore     # to ignore profile and library
...               # all other files, e.g. data

Project based workflows

pak:::proj_create()
pak:::proj_install()
pak:::proj_install_dev()
pak:::proj_remove()
pak:::proj_status()

Roadmap

• Better project based workflows
• Better failure diagnostics, e.g. system dependencies
• Speedup, speedup, speedup
• More remote types (GitLab, BitBucket, etc.)