Pinning an R environment with renv so a result still rebuilds in three years

A regulator can ask you to reproduce a result years after you filed it. Not a similar result. The same one, from the same code, to the same digits. That is a high bar for R, because an R script does not carry its dependencies with it. Run it on a machine where one package has moved a minor version and an output can change in ways that are easy to miss and hard to defend. The renv package exists…