Show HN: Rv, a Package Manager for R

  • You might want to consider writing a plugin for R with Mise en Place https://mise.jdx.dev/core-tools.html This would extend your reach and might take some of the heavy lifting out of the project. (At least for the runtime portion. I don't think it will help with package management.)

  • Maybe some code could be shared with the `uv`[1] to avoid re-implementing same things.

    [1] https://github.com/astral-sh/uv

  • Very cool! Are you planning for there to be a corresponding R package that exposes the high level commands? The popularity of the usethis package really showed the power of keeping people within the R interpreter rather than going back and forth with the terminal. This is so important for a language like R that has so many users without much CS training

  • I'm curious — does rv support or plan to support per-project isolation of system-level dependencies (e.g., gfortran, libxml2, etc.) like what renv sometimes indirectly requires users to manage outside R? If not, do you have recommendations for managing these in a reproducible way alongside rv?

  • My biggest issue with R package management is version pinning. If I specify an older version of a package, R will fetch the latest versions of all its dependencies, regardless if they're compatible or not, which leads to manually chasing down and re-installing specific versions of dependencies and sub-dependencies one-by-one.

    Microsoft's CRAN time machine helped solved this, but I think they've recently shut it down and I don't really trust Posit to not have a version behind a paywall.

  • Ok, this is really promising. I've always found renv to be slightly frustrating to use and it ends up breaking in mysterious ways after a time. rv was a joy to use in a small personal repo.

  • Looks interesting, I’m excited to give it a try.

    Is there any plan to have it create a manifest (like renv.lock) that can be used directly with the posit publishing system?

  • is using Rust to rewrite existing package managers a new trendy thing

    feels we eagerly need cv -> C/C++ package manager

  • Can this be used to effectively create R environments? I’m desperate for such a solution.

  • Is it possible to override transitive dependencies?

  • Can it be used for installing from bioconductor?