Background

This section provides the conceptual groundwork for understanding why dependency management matters for reproducibility, and how R’s package ecosystem works.

• Reproducibility — What we mean by reproducibility, why code reproducibility matters, and the “works on my machine” problem.
• Software Dependencies — An introduction to software dependencies and how they complicate the goal of reproducible research.
• Technical Definitions — Clarifying terminology: packages, libraries, and repositories in the R ecosystem.
• R Package Managers — How R packages are distributed through CRAN, Bioconductor, GitHub, and other sources.

If you’re already comfortable with these concepts, feel free to jump straight to the {renv} section.