Anonymized e-mail interviews with R package maintainers active on CRAN and GitHub
This work addresses dependency management issues for R package maintainers, but it is incremental as it provides supplementary interview data without new methodological insights.
The study investigated the challenges of inter-repository package dependencies in the R ecosystem by conducting anonymized email interviews with five active R package maintainers from CRAN and GitHub to understand their development and distribution practices.
This technical report accompanies a research article that empirically studies the problems related to inter-repository package dependencies in the R ecosystem of statistical computing, with a focus on R packages hosted on CRAN and GitHub. The current report provides supplementary material, reproducing an anonymised and sanitised version of e-mail interviews that have been conducted in November 2015 with five active R package maintainers. The goal was to gain a better understanding in how R package maintainers develop and distribute their packages through GitHub and CRAN. All five interviewees were actively maintaining packages on GitHub, some were also active on CRAN. They have been selected based on their profile (the number of R packages they maintain on GitHub and/or CRAN) as well as their gender (three interviewees were male, two were female).