Difference between r-base and r-recommended packages

r packages built-in
jan5 picture jan5 · Mar 14, 2012 · Viewed 10.9k times · Source

Can anyone tell me what is the difference between base and recommended packages.

If there is link where base and recommended packages are mentioned please provide the links.

Answer

Dirk Eddelbuettel picture Dirk Eddelbuettel · Mar 14, 2012

The difference actually comes from R Core and the way the R code is organised, for example in the upstream SVN repository.

In src/library/, you have all 'base' packages:

  • base
  • compiler
  • datasets
  • graphics
  • grDevices
  • grid
  • methods
  • parallel
  • splines
  • stats
  • stats4
  • tcltk
  • tools
  • translations
  • utils.

And none of these are on CRAN -- they only exist as part of 'base R'.

And you have a directory src/library/Recommended which by default is empty, but can be filled by using a helper script (tools/rsync-recommended) to get the list of Recommended packages off CRAN from a special (versioned) directory. For R version 3.3.3, it is CRAN/src/contrib/3.3.3/Recommended/ (with the CRAN part being your default mirror). It contains

  • KernSmooth
  • MASS
  • Matrix
  • boot
  • class
  • cluster
  • codetools
  • foreign
  • lattice
  • mgcv
  • nlme
  • nnet
  • rpart
  • spatial
  • survival

Edit 2016-09-06: Added utils to first set.

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