Dirk Eddelbuettel

Sat, 23 Mar 2024

littler 0.3.20 on CRAN: Moar Features!

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The twentyfirst release of littler as a CRAN package landed on CRAN just now, following in the now eighteen 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 began 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 contains another fair number of small changes and improvements to some of the scripts I use daily to build or test packages, adds a new front-end ciw.r for the recently-released ciw package offering a ‘CRAN Incoming Watcher’, a new helper installDeps2.r (extending installDeps.r), a new doi-to-bib converter, allows a different temporary directory setup I find helpful, deals with one corner deployment use, and more.

The full change description follows.

Changes in littler version 0.3.20 (2024-03-23)

  • Changes in examples scripts

    • New (dependency-free) helper installDeps2.r to install dependencies

    • Scripts rcc.r, tt.r, tttf.r, tttlr.r use env argument -S to set -t to r

    • tt.r can now fill in inst/tinytest if it is present

    • New script ciw.r wrapping new package ciw

    • tttf.t can now use devtools and its loadall

    • New script doi2bib.r to call the DOI converter REST service (following a skeet by Richard McElreath)

  • Changes in package

    • The CI setup uses checkout@v4 and the r-ci-setup action

    • The Suggests: is a little tighter as we do not list all packages optionally used in the the examples (as R does not check for it either)

    • The package load messag can account for the rare build of R under different architecture (Berwin Turlach in #117 closing #116)

    • In non-vanilla mode, the temporary directory initialization in re-run allowing for a non-standard temp dir via config settings

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 (in a day or two) 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 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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