  Free and open source software package ecosystems have existed for a long time
and are among the most sophisticated human-made systems. One of the oldest and
most popular software package ecosystems is CRAN, the repository of packages of
the statistical language R, which is also one of the most popular environments
for statistical computing nowadays. CRAN stores a large number of packages that
are updated regularly and depend on a number of other packages in a complex
graph of relations; such graph is empirically studied from the perspective of
complex network analysis (CNA) in the current article, showing how network
theory and measures proposed by previous work can help profiling the ecosystem
and detecting strengths, good practices and potential risks in three
perspectives: macroscopic properties of the ecosystem (structure and complexity
of the network), microscopic properties of individual packages (represented as
nodes), and modular properties (community detection). Results show how complex
network analysis tools can be used to assess a package ecosystem and, in
particular, that of CRAN.
