John Mount has a critique of meta-packages:
Derek Jones recently discussed a possible future for the
Recosystem in “StatsModels: the first nail in R’s coffin”.This got me thinking on the future of
CRAN(which I consider vital toR, and vital in distributing our work) in the era of super-popular meta-packages. Meta-packages are convenient, but they have a profoundly negative impact on the packages they exclude.
I’m not really sold on Jones’s argument, but I do think Mount has a good point.