Dirk Eddelbuettel

Sun, 15 Aug 2021

RcppBDT 0.2.4 on CRAN: Updates

After a seven-year break (!!), the RcppBDT packages has been updated on CRAN.

The RcppBDT package is an early adopter of Rcpp and was one of the first packages utilizing Boost and its Date_Time library. The now more widely-used package anytime is a direct descentant of RcppBDT.

In fact, the last time RcppBDT was released, anytime did not yet exist. And some of the changes now finally released here in this version are some of the first steps made towards what became anytime. RcppBDT is broader in scope and provides a wider range of functionality but in a somewhat rougher form as we never sat down writing higher-end wrappers in R for all the potential use cases. When we wrote the first RcppBDT versions, many other popular date/time packages were all in R code and not compiled, and this package showed how things could be done at the compiled level. Now other packages, including anytime have filled the void so fully polishing RcppBDT may never happen. In any event, this release refreshes the package and brings it to full R CMD check --as-cran compliance.

The NEWS entry follows:

Changes in version 0.2.4 (2021-08-15)

  • New utility function toPOSIXct which can take multitple input format (integer, floating point or character) vectors and can convert by relying on a wide variety of standard formats. This predates what has long been split off into a new package anytime which is more functional and feaureful.

  • New demo 'toPOSIXct' illustrating the feature.

  • New demo 'toPOSIXctTiming' benchmarking it.

  • Documentation for new functions was added as well.

  • CI now uses run.sh from r-ci.

  • Functions getLastDayOfWeekInMonth and getFirstDayOfWeekInMonth now use dow argument.

  • The shared library is now registered when loaded from NAMESPACE.

  • C level entry points are now registered as R now recommends.

  • Several badges were added to the README.md file.

  • Several fields were added to the DESCRIPTION file, and/or updated.

  • Documentation URLs where both updated as needed and converted to https.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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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