A new metric named 'dependency heaviness' is proposed that measures the number
of additional dependency packages that a parent package brings to its child package
and are unique to the dependency packages imported by all other parents.
The dependency heaviness analysis is visualized by a customized heatmap.
The package is described in .
We have also performed the dependency heaviness analysis on the CRAN/Bioconductor
package ecosystem and the results are implemented as a web-based database
which provides comprehensive tools for querying dependencies of individual R packages.
The systematic analysis on the CRAN/Bioconductor ecosystem is described in
. From 'pkgndep' version 2.0.0, the heaviness
database includes snapshots of the CRAN/Bioconductor ecosystems for many old R versions.