I full agree. With version number you can have a good sense whether a package update breaks your code or not (as long the package authors following semantic versioning).

I think in julia this problem is solved quite nicely with the Project.toml (list of package that you directly dependent) and Manifest.toml file (the version numbers of the complete dependency tree which is automatically generated).

It seems that in groundhog you declare only direct dependencies. Is there a way to store the full dependency tree in R ?