Wed, 22 Sep 2021

prrd 0.0.5: Incremental Mode

prrd facilitates the parallel running [of] reverse dependency [checks] when preparing R packages. It is used extensively for Rcpp, RcppArmadillo, RcppEigen, BH, and others.

prrd screenshot image

The key idea of prrd is simple, and described in some more detail on its webpage and its GitHub repo. Reverse dependency checks are an important part of package development that is easily done in a (serial) loop. But these checks are also generally embarassingly parallel as there is no or little interdependency between them (besides maybe shared build depedencies). See the (dated) screenshot (running six parallel workers, arranged in a split byobu session).

This release brings some new features I used of late when testing and re-testing reverse dependencies for Rcpp. Enqueuing jobs can now consider the most recent prior job queue file. This allows us to find new packages that were not part of the previous runs. We added a second toggle to also add those packages who failed in the previous run. Finally, the dequeue interface allows to specify a date (rather than defaulting to the current date, useful for long-running jobs or restarts).

The release is summarised in the NEWS entry:

Changes in prrd version 0.0.5 (2021-09-22)

  • Some remaing http URLs were changed to https.

  • The dequeueJobs script has a new argument date to help specify a queue file.

  • The enqueueJobs can now compute just a ‘delta’ of (new) packages relative to a given prior queuefile and run.

  • When running in ‘delta’ mode, previously failed packages can also be selected.

My CRANberries provides the usual summary of changes to the previous version. See the aforementioned webpage and its repo for details. For more questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

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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