Infer correct version of dependencies for a specific date

[remram44]

If I am trying to reproduce some experiment I found somewhere, it would be nice to be able to tell Dockter when this experiment was written, so it can find the correct version of dependencies for that date. It is unlikely that it will work with whatever the latest available versions are.

I had played with that for Python/pip, but obviously this needs integration with other package managers to work in other languages.

This might be out of scope for you, but could be a great feature for reproducibility!

[nokome]

Agreed, that would be great! Hope that pip PR get's merged in.

In Dockter you can do that for R by specifying the date in the DESCRIPTION file (see README). We use the MRAN snapshots to get the version of R and all the packages on that date. See https://github.com/stencila/dockter/blob/master/src/install.R for how we use the specified data to set the MRAN date.