Dirk Eddelbuettel

Sun, 28 Aug 2022

littler 0.3.16 on CRAN: Package Updates

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The seventeenth release of littler as a CRAN package just landed, following in the now sixteen 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, the first since last December, further extends install2.r accept multiple repos options thanks to Tatsuya Shima, overhauls and substantially extends installBioc.r thanks to Pieter Moris, and includes a number of (generally smaller) changes I added (see below).

The full change description follows.

Changes in littler version 0.3.16 (2022-08-28)

  • Changes in package

    • The configure code checks for two more headers

    • The RNG seeding matches the current version in R (Dirk)

  • Changes in examples

    • A cowu.r 'check Window UCRT' helper was added (Dirk)

    • A getPandoc.r downloader has been added (Dirk)

    • The -r option tp install2.r has been generalzed (Tatsuya Shima in #95)

    • The rcc.r code / package checker now has valgrind option (Dirk)

    • install2.r now installs to first element in .libPaths() by default (Dirk)

    • A very simple r2u.r help has been added (Dirk)

    • The installBioc.r has been generalized and extended similar to install2.r (Pieter Moris in #103)

My CRANberries service provides a comparison to the previous release. Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page, and also on the 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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