Abstract: We will look at this history of CRAN, its success and its shortcomings. We try to answer some of the question you always had about CRAN: - What and who is CRAN? - Why are these CRAN maintainers so nitpicking on what appears to be some irrelevant Note in my package and why do I have to check it prior to submission? - How does CRAN exist physically? - What are the technical solutions to keep a repository of more than 10000 packages running? - How can we check those many packages on several flavour of R and platforms on a single day? - What are the human resources that have been spent during the last years? - How can package maintainers help to get the workload as small as possible? - What are the necessary changes for the future we have to tackle in order to keep such a repository as successful as it is today? - What will happen during the next 20 years of CRAN?
