Fri, 15 Mar 2019

littler 0.3.7: Small tweaks

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The eight release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the thirteen-ish year history as a package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later.

littler is the first command-line interface for R and predates Rscript. And it is (in my very biased eyes) better as it allows for piping as well shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript converted to rather recently.

littler lives on Linux and Unix, has its difficulties on macOS due to yet-another-braindeadedness there (who ever thought case-insensitive filesystems as a default where a good idea?) and simply does not exist on Windows (yet – the build system could be extended – see RInside for an existence proof, and volunteers are welcome!).

A few examples as highlighted at the Github repo, as well as in the examples vignette.

This release brings an small update (thanks to Gergely) to scripts install2.r and installGithub.r allow more flexible setting of repositories, and fixes a minor nag from CRAN concerning autoconf programming style.

The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.6 (2019-01-26)

  • Changes in examples

    • The scripts installGithub.r and install2.r get a new option -r | --repos (Gergely Daroczi in #67)
  • Changes in build system

    • The AC_DEFINE macro use rewritten to please R CMD check.

CRANberries provides a comparison to the previous release. Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page. The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs and now of course all from its CRAN page and via install.packages("littler"). Binary packages are available directly in Debian as well as soon via Ubuntu binaries at CRAN thanks to the tireless Michael Rutter.

Comments and suggestions are welcome at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

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