The CRAN Task View Initiative
Achim Zeileis, Roger Bivand, Dirk Eddelbuettel, Kurt Hornik, Julia Piaskowski, and Nathalie Vialaneix
The R Journal
2025-10-04
2025 • Volume 17 • Issue 2 • pp 4-14
Abstract
CRAN Task Views have been available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network since 2005. They provide guidance about which CRAN packages are relevant for tasks related to a certain topic, and can also facilitate automatic installation of all corresponding packages. Motivated by challenges from the growth of CRAN and the R community as a whole since 2005, all of the task view infrastructure and workflows were rethought and relaunched in 2021/22 in order to facilitate maintenance, and to foster deeper interactions with the R community. The redesign encompassed the establishment of a group of CRAN Task View Editors, moving all task view sources to dedicated GitHub repositories, adopting well-documented workflows with a code of conduct, and leveraging R/Markdown files (rather than XML) for the content of the task views.