Title: Managing Huge R Package Repositories Problems and Required Changes Author: Uwe Ligges Abstract: Managing a CRAN package repository becomes more and more time consuming both for human and computer resources. A CRAN repository will probably contain more than 1000 packages in 2007. Therefore, manual intervention is not an option and even if the R package management system has gone a long and successful way to support the repository maintainer, some more improvements are required for supporting future checks of more than 1000 packages. I would like to propose a couple of minor and major changes to the package management system, some of them cross platform issues, some of them Windows related. Two examples are: - Making the check for package dependencies faster. This is extremely slow (at least under Windows) if many packages (i.e. several hundreds) are installed. As an example, a database for each library might overcome this problem. - Making parallel installations (respecting dependencies) and checks possible for multi-core systems. A full installation and check run for Windows for the CRAN package repository currently takes much more than 30 hours on an Intel Xeon 3.06 GHz machine with 2Gb RAM.