Tue, 01 Sep 2026

gaussfacts 0.0.4 on CRAN: New Feature

Another new release of the gaussfacts package arrived on CRAN. This follows a recent one a good week ago, which had been 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.

This release corrects an old typo, thanks to an issue filed right after the last release. It also adds a small (but useful) feature that (most if not all of) the other fortunes-alike packages already have: the ability to look up by (matching) character string.

So to take an example, asking for “dice”’ gets us these two cracker quotes that still make me smile:

> gaussfacts::gaussfact("dice")     # match string
God does not play dice, unless Gauss promises to let him win once in a while. 
God does not play dice with the universe, but Gauss does. 
> 

Thanks for an issue filed, we also corrected an old typo. The NEWS file entry follows.

Changes in version 0.0.4 (2026-09-01)

• Support character argument to support lookup via regular expression

• Correct one old typo in README.md

Otherwise, and always worth noting, this update had a particularly speedy passage at CRAN taking a whole six minutes:

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

Mon, 24 Aug 2026

gaussfacts 0.0.3 on CRAN: Maintenance

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