A new release of the anytime package is arriving on CRAN. This is the sixteenth release, and comes a good month after the 0.3.4 release.
anytime is a very focused package aiming to do just one thing really well: to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, … format to either POSIXct or Date objects – and to do so without requiring a format string. See the anytime page, or the GitHub README.md for a few examples.
This release brings a reworked fallback mechanism enabled via the useR=TRUE option. Because Windows remains a challenging platform which, among other more important ailments, also does not provide timezone information, we no longer rely on the RApiDatetime package which exposes parts of the R API. This works everywhere where timezone information is available, but less so on Windows. Instead, we now use Rcpp::Function to call directly back into R. This received a considerable amount of testing, and the package should now work even better when either a timezone is set, or the Windows fallback is used, or both. My thanks to Christoph Sax for patiently testing and helping to debug this, as well as for his two pull requests contributing to this release (even if one of these is now redundant as we no longer use RApiDatetime).
The full list of changes follows.
Changes in anytime version 0.3.5 (2019-07-28)
Fix use of
Rcpp::Function-accessedSys.setenv(), name all arguments in call to C++ (Christoph Sax in #95).Relax constraint on Windows testing in several test files (Christoph Sax in #97).
Fix an issue related to
TZenvironment variable setting (Dirk in #101).Change
useR=TRUEbehaviour by directly calling R via Rcpp (Dirk in #103 fixing #96).Several updates to unit testing files aiming for more robust behaviour across platforms.
Updated documentation in manual pages, README and vignette.
Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More information is on the anytime page. The issue tracker tracker off the GitHub repo can be use for questions and comments.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.