Why use `devtools::install_github` instead of `remotes::install_github`?

Question

The recommendations in "R Packages (2e)" by Hadley Wickham and Jennifer Bryan leave you with the following installation recommendation in your README file:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("jennybc/regexcite")

However, I frequently use remotes::install_github instead since the remotes library is much easier to install. I've often been unable install devtools at all and when it does install it takes a significant amount of time to do so. In contrast, I've never had a failure installing remotes and it installs very quickly. This matters more for running R code on clusters, servers, and Docker images and not standard R Studio setups. I know that the functionality is identical since it originates from remotes either way and in other situations "R Packages" encourages using the minimal dependencies possible. Therefore I want to suggest remotes instead in my README.

Is there any reason not to recommend remotes over devtools? The only thing I can think of is that users are more likely to recognize the devtools name and know if they have it installed already.

Answer 1

If that recommendation is still in print, it would seems outdated. These days, using remotes::install_github() is preferable, and has been since that package got split off.

One reason is that it has a much smaller installation footprint:

> db <- tools::CRAN_package_db()
> deps <- tools::package_dependencies(c("devtools", "remotes"), recursive=TRUE, db=db)
> sapply(deps, length)
devtools  remotes 
     101        4 
> 

(This count is still biased upwards, the four for remote are all base R packages.)

So in sum, you adopted the right pattern and can stick with it.