Tue, 05 Oct 2021

littler 0.3.14: Updates

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The fifteenth release of littler as a CRAN package just landed, following in the now fifteen 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 as it predates Rscript. It allows for piping as well for shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript only started to do in recent years.

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 were 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!). See the FAQ vignette on how to add it to your PATH.

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

This release updates the helper scripts to download nighlies of RStudio Server and Desktop to their new naming scheme, adds a downloader for Quarto, extends the roxy.r wrapper with a new option, and updates the configure setting as requestion by CRAN and more. See the NEWS file entry below for more.

Changes in littler version 0.3.14 (2021-10-05)

  • Changes in examples

    • Updated RStudio download helper to changed file names

    • Added a new option to roxy.r wrapper

    • Added a downloader for Quarto command-line tool

  • Changes in package

    • The configure files were updated to the standard of autoconf version 2.69 following a CRAN request

My CRANberries provides a comparison to the previous release. Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page, and now also on the new package docs website. The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs and now of course also 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.

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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