What's a good strategy for saving old R package versions on GitHub?
<p>The development of RStudio and the packages <code>devtools</code> and <code>roxygen2</code> has made R package creation pretty easy. I use GitHub for version control and <code>devtools</code> allows others to easily install directly from my account. </p>

<p>As my package gradually changes with each version, I'm wondering if I should be maintaining .zip files (or other format) of my past stable builds, in case anyone would ever want to use a previous version. </p>

<p>It's easy to download a .zip of an R package directly from GitHub, but I'm wondering if I should add this to the same GitHub directory (e.g. <a href="https://github.com/myaccount/mypackage/previous_versions/mypackage_0.1.zip" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/myaccount/mypackage/previous_versions/mypackage_0.1.zip</a>) without messing up somebody's installation via <code>install_github("myaccount/mypackage")</code>.</p>

<p>So, the main Qs are:</p>

<ol>
<li>Should I keep an old package version at all?</li>
<li>Should I keep old package versions in a sub-folder of my GitHub R package directory?</li>
<li>Should I save .zip files downloaded from GitHub as my old version, or produce a Source or Binary file during the package build itself (i.e. in RStudio)?</li>
<li>Is this a superfluous activity if one isn't yet willing to publish to CRAN?!</li>
</ol>