R's exponential package growth, ctd.

Reader SK has collected the most recent data on R's package growth, through the latest 2.10 release. The three most recent releases fall slightly below the exponential growth line, which isn't altogether surprising (that's a lot of growth to sustain!). Another interesting thing to look at would be the combined rate of new packages submitted to CRAN and packages updated on CRAN: as R packages begin to cover the domain space of possible applications I'd expect updates to be where much of the package activity lies.

For anyone interested, the raw data (as calculated by SK) is available after the jump.

vers  count  date
1.3	110	2001-06-21
1.4	129	2001-12-17
1.5	161	2002-06-12
1.6	163	
1.7	219	2003-05-25
1.8	273	2003-11-16
1.9	357	2004-06-05
2.0	406	2004-10-12
2.1	548	2005-06-18
2.2	647	2005-12-16
2.3	739	2006-05-31
2.4	911	2006-12-12
2.5	1000	2007-04-12
2.6	1300	2007-11-16
2.7	1495	2008-03-18
2.8	1614	2008-10-20
2.9	1907	2009-04-17
2.10	2008	2009-10-26
 

Comments

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

I suspect that we need account for fragmentation -- the other chart on r-help participation showed volumes level off. But that simply omitted the rise in r-sig-* postings which were added to later versions of John's presentation / paper.

Similarly, I suspect we also need to chart R-Forge growth in terms of packages (and users).

[David Smith]

Good points. Should also be considering Bioconductor as well as R-Forge to address the fragmentation in the packages, I guess.