The most prolific package maintainers on CRAN

During a discussion with some other members of the R Consortium, the question came up: who maintains the most packages on CRAN? DataCamp maintains a list of most active maintainers by downloads, but in this case we were interested in the total number of packages by maintainer. Fortunately, this is pretty easy to figure thanks to the CRAN repository tools now included in R, and a little dplyr (see the code below) gives the answer quickly[*].

And the answer? The most prolific maintainer is Scott Chamberlain from ROpenSci, who is currently the maintainer of 77 packages. Here's a list of the top 20:

                Maint  n
1   Scott Chamberlain 77
2   Dirk Eddelbuettel 53
3        Gabor Csardi 50
4      Hadley Wickham 41
5         Jeroen Ooms 40
6            ORPHANED 37
7    Thomas J. Leeper 29
8           Bob Rudis 28
9    Henrik Bengtsson 28
10        Kurt Hornik 28
11       Oliver Keyes 28
12    Martin Maechler 27
13     Richard Cotton 27
14 Robin K. S. Hankin 25
15      Simon Urbanek 24
16      Kirill Muller 23
17    Torsten Hothorn 23
18      Achim Zeileis 22
19       Paul Gilbert 22
20          Yihui Xie 21

[Update Mar 23: updated the R code and the results to treat Gabor Csardi and Gábor Csárdi as the same person, and corrected a trailing space issue that failed to count 2 of Hadley Wickham's packages.] (That list of orphaned packages with no current maintainer includes XML, d3heatmap, and  flexclust, to name just 3 of the 37.) Here's the R code used to calculate the top 20:

[*]Well, it would have been quick, until I noticed that some maintainers had two forms of their name in the database, one with surrounding quotes and one without. It seemed like it was going to be trivial to fix with a regular expression, but it took me longer than I hoped to come up with the final regexp on line 6 above, which is now barely distinguishable from line noise. As usual, there an xkcd for this situation:

 

Comments

[Jonathan Taylor]

So this post reminds me of something I'd really like to get feedback on. Quite a bit of the serious statistical analysis in R relies on the packages in CRAN. What happens when those packages are no longer maintained? Is there anyone out there that has put together a contingency plan for such a situation in their business?

[David Smith]

The biggest problem with orphaned packages is that they may be removed from CRAN if they start throwing errors in new versions of R. That's how packages become orphaned, actually: when maintainers stop responding to CRAN emails. It's not *always* a death sentence though; several of those orphaned packages have been in that state for years.

What you should plan on is supporting older versions of R in your systems, rather than committing to start maintaining old packages in new versions of R. That's best practice in a production system, anyway. Yesterday's post about Rocker provides some good tools to create containers with fixed versions of R and compatible packages, so you don't need to worry if they become orphaned later. Provided you trust the results today, of course.

[Kent Johnson]

A simpler regular expression is

^['"]?(.*?)['"]?$

.

[David Smith]

@Kent I think that was my first iteration, but the data also has email addresses delimited by < > that I needed to strip. Also some of the names had suffixes like ", companyname" or "(title)" that I needed to strip as well. It all seemed so simple at first...