Mon, 24 Aug 2026

gaussfacts 0.0.3 on CRAN: Maintenance

Gauss

A new release of gaussfacts package arrived on CRAN – the first in pretty much exactly a decade! gaussfacts provides a fortunes-inspired function to display randomly-chosen facts about Carl Friedrich Gauss, based on the collection curated by Mike Cavers via the gaussfacts web site (with an archive.org link it case it vanishes again). Each call of gaussfact() displays another (randomly chosen, or indexed) fact.

An example:

> gaussfacts::gaussfact(9)
Gauss once played himself in a zero-sum game and won $50. 
> 

This releases, as detailed below, accumulates a number of smaller maintenance changes including switching to Authors@R. Functionality has not changed. Oddly enough, it appears that I did not blog about the package when I created it in August 2016. So to (partially) make up for that, the NEWS for all three releases follow.

Changes in version 0.0.3 (2026-08-23)

  • Several rounds of continuous integration maintenance and enhancements

  • Additional README.md badges

  • Updates to DESCRIPTION as CRAN requirements change

  • A duplicate data entry has been removed (Tim Pokart in #4)

  • Documentation prefers https URLs

  • Updated continunous integration multiple times

  • Correct man page removing an erroneous duplicate word

Changes in version 0.0.2 (2016-08-03)

  • Support 'ind' argument to reference by position

  • Clean-up encoding and support extended character set (#2 closes #1)

  • Updated continunous integration (#3)

Changes in version 0.0.1 (2016-06-19)

  • Initial version and CRAN upload

Thanks to my CRANberries, there is a diff to the previous release. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

/code/gaussfacts | permanent link