The R ecosystem includes a few mailing lists for technical issues. The archives of these lists are freely available, and can be searched specifically (e.g. on Google for r-devel) with pattern {search terms} site:/stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/ (h/t @gmbecker).
This repository exists so you can clone it & then use command-line facilities like grep/awk to search more flexibly, or if you wanted to turn these archives into a data set (e.g. for NLP).
Infinite gratitude to the maintainers of R, CRAN, and these mailing lists.
We track the following archives (file an issue to get a new list added):
This list is for major (aka "important") announcements about the development of R and the availability of new code
This list is intended for questions and discussion about code development in R. Questions likely to prompt discussion unintelligible to non-programmers or topics that are too technical for R-help's audience should go to R-devel
The main R mailing list, for announcements about the development of R and the availability of new code, questions and answers about problems and solutions using R, enhancements and patches to the source code and documentation of R, comparison and compatibility with S and S-plus, and for the posting of nice examples and benchmarks.
This list is to get help about package development in R. The goal of the list is to provide a forum for learning about the package development process. We hope to build a community of R package developers who can help each other solve problems, and reduce some of the burden on the CRAN maintainers. If you are having problems developing a package or passing R CMD check, this is the place to ask!
This list might be used also for bug reports or feature requests on the R application for OS X.