Sat, 23 Mar 2024

littler 0.3.20 on CRAN: Moar Features!

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.

/code/littler | permanent link

Sun, 17 Dec 2023

littler 0.3.19 on CRAN: Several Updates

The twentieth release of littler as a CRAN package landed a few minutes ago, following in the now seventeen 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 a fair number of small changes and improvements to some of the example scripts is run daily.

The full change description follows.

Changes in littler version 0.3.19 (2023-12-17)

• Changes in examples scripts

  • The help or usage text display for r2u.r, ttt.r, check.r has been improved, expanded or corrected, respectively

  • installDeps.r has a new argument for dependency selection

  • An initial 'single test file' runner tttf.r has been added

  • r2u.r has two new options for setting / varying the Debian build version of package that is built, and one for BioConductor builds, one for a 'dry run' build, and a new --compile option

  • installRSPM.r, installPPM.r, installP3M.r have been updates to reflect the name changes

  • installRub.r now understands 'package@universe' too

  • tt.r flips the default of the --effects switch

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.

/code/littler | permanent link

Sun, 26 Mar 2023

littler 0.3.18 on CRAN: New and Updated Scripts

The nineteenth release of littler as a CRAN package landed this morning, following in the now seventeen 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 is somewhat unique is not having any maintenance of the small core but rather focussing exclusively on changes to the (many !!) scripts collected in examples/scripts/. We added new ones and extended several existing ones including install2.r thanks to patches by @eitsupi. Of the new scripts, I already use tttl.r quite a bit for tests on co-maintained packages that use testthat (but as I have made known before my heart belongs firmly to tinytest as nobody should need thirty-plus recursive dependencies to run a few test predicates) as well as the very new installRub.r to directly add r-universe Ubuntu binaries onto an r2u systems as demonstrated in a first and second tweet (and corresponding toot) this week.

The full change description follows.

Changes in littler version 0.3.18 (2023-03-25)

• Changes in examples scripts

  • roxy.r can now set an additional --libpath

  • getRStudioDesktop.r and getRStudioServer.r have updated default download file

  • install2.r and installGithub.r can set --type

  • r2u.r now has a --suffix option

  • tt.r removes a redundant library call

  • tttl.r has been added for testthat::test_local()

  • installRub.r has been added to install r-universe binaries on Ubuntu

  • install2.r has updated error capture messages (Tatsuya Shima and Dirk in #104)

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 (currently in ‘experimental’ due to a release freeze) as well as (in a day or two) Ubuntu binaries at CRAN thanks to the tireless Michael Rutter — and of course via r2u following its next refresh.

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.

/code/littler | permanent link

Sat, 29 Oct 2022

littler 0.3.17 on CRAN: Maintenance

The eighteenth 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, coming just a few weeks since the last release in August, heeds to clang-15 a updates one signature to a proper interface. It also contains one kindly contributed patch updating install2.r (and installBioc.r) to cope with a change in R-devel.

The full change description follows.

Changes in littler version 0.3.17 (2022-10-29)

• Changes in package

  • An internal function prototype was updated for clang-15.

• Changes in examples

  • The install2.r and installBioc. were updated for an update in R-devel (Tatsuya Shima and Dirk in #104).

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.

/code/littler | permanent link

Sun, 28 Aug 2022

littler 0.3.16 on CRAN: Package Updates

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.

/code/littler | permanent link

Fri, 03 Dec 2021

littler 0.3.15 on CRAN: Package Updates

The sixteenth 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 brings a more robust and featureful install2.r script (thanks to Gergely Daróczi), corrects some documentation typos (thanks to John Kerl), and now compacts pdf vignette better when using the build.r helper. It also one more updates the URLs for the two RStudio downloaders, and adds a simplermarkdown wrapper. Next, we removed the YAML file (and badge) for the disgraced former continuous integration service we shall not name (yet that we all used to use). And, following digest two days ago and drat yesterday, we converted the vignettes from using the minidown package to the (fairly new) simplermarkdown package which is so much more appropriate for our use of the minimal water.css style.

The full change description follows.

Changes in littler version 0.3.15 (2021-12-03)

• Changes in examples

  • The install2 script can select download methods, and cope with errors from parallel download (thanks to Gergely Daroczi)

  • The build.r now uses both as argument to --compact-vignettes

  • The RStudio download helper were once again updated for changed URLs

  • New caller for simplermarkdown::mdweave_to_html

• Changes in package

  • Several typos were correct (thanks to John Kerl)

  • Travis artifacts and badges have been pruned

  • Vignettes now use simplermarkdown

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.

/code/littler | permanent link

Tue, 05 Oct 2021

littler 0.3.14: Updates

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.

/code/littler | permanent link

Sat, 24 Jul 2021

littler 0.3.13: Moar Goodies

The fourteenth 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 brings two new example scripts and command wrappers (compiledDeps.r, silenceTwitterAccount.r), along with extensions, corrections, or polish for a number a of other examples as detailed in the NEWS file entry below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.13 (2021-07-24)

• Changes in examples

  • New script compiledDeps.r to show which dependencies are compiled

  • New script silenceTwitterAccount.r wrapping rtweet

  • The -c or --code option for installRSPM.r was corrected

  • The kitten.r script now passes options ‘bunny’ and ‘puppy’ on to the pkgKitten::kitten() call; new options to call the Arma and Eigen variants were added

  • The getRStudioDesktop.r and getRStudioServer.r scripts were updated for a change in rvest

  • Two typos in the tt.r help message were correct (Aaron Wolen in #86)

  • The message in cranIncoming.r was corrected.

• Changes in package

  • Added Continuous Integration runner via run.sh from r-ci.

  • Two vignettes got two extra vignette attributes.

  • The mkdocs-material documentation input was moved.

  • The basic unit tests were slightly refactored and updated.

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.

/code/littler | permanent link

Wed, 07 Oct 2020

littler 0.3.12: Exciting updates

The thirteenth release of littler as a CRAN package became available today (after a three day ‘rest’ at CRAN for no real reason), following in the fourteen-ish 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 where 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 brings five new example scripts and command wrappers:

• installDeps.r installs all dependencies of package (directory or tarball)
• installRSPM.r relies on RSPM to install binary packages
• installBSPM.r relies on BSPM to install binary packages (esp. on Linux)
• cranIncomimg.r checks the incoming queue for one or more packages
• urlUpdates.r checks and/or updates stale URLs leading to redirects

A number of commands were also extended or updated (see below for more). We have a new and very slick documentation website once again utilising Material for MkDocs. Last but not least the two included vignettes now use minidown and the fabulous water css theme—which reduced the file sizes of the two vignettes from, respectively, 884kb and 873kb to 47kb and 15kb. Yes, that is correct. That alone brought the package file size down from 641kb to 116kb. Incredible.

The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.12 (2020-10-04)

• Changes in examples

  • Updates to scripts tt.r, cos.r, cow.r, c4r.r, com.r

  • New script installDeps.r to install dependencies

  • Several updates tp script check.r

  • New script installBSPM.r and installRSPM.r for binary package installation (Dirk and Iñaki in #81)

  • New script cranIncoming.r to check in Incoming

  • New script urlUpdate.r validates URLs as R does

• Changes in package

  • Travis CI now uses BSPM

  • A package documentation website was added

  • Vignettes now use minidown resulting in much reduced filesizes: from over 800kb to under 50kb (Dirk in #83)

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. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/littler | permanent link

Fri, 26 Jun 2020

littler 0.3.11: docopt updates

The twelveth release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the fourteen-ish 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 where 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 mostly responds to the recent docopt release 0.7.0 which brought a breaking change for quoted arguments. In short, it is for the better because an option --as-cran is now available parsed as opt$as_cran which is easier than the earlier form where we needed to back-tick protect as-cran containing an underscore. We also added a new portmanteau-ish option to roxy.r.

The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.11 (2020-06-26)

• Changes in examples

  • Scripts check.r and rcc.r updated to reflect updated docopt 0.7.0 behaviour of quoted arguments

  • The roxy.r script has a new ease-of-use option -f | --full regrouping two other options.

CRANberries provides a comparison to the previous release. Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page. 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. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/littler | permanent link

Wed, 03 Jun 2020

littler 0.3.10: Some more updates

The eleventh release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the fourteen-ish 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 where 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 adds a new helper / example script installBioc.r for BioConductor package installation, generalizes the roxygenize() wrapper roxy.r a little, and polished a couple of other corners.

The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.10 (2020-06-02)

• Changes in examples

  • The update.r script only considers writeable directories.

  • The rcc.r script tries to report full logs by setting _R_CHECK_TESTS_NLINES_=0.

  • The tt.r script has an improved ncpu fallback.

  • Several installation and updating scripts set _R_SHLIB_STRIP_ to TRUE.

  • A new script installBioc.r was added.

  • The --error option to install2.r was generalized (Sergio Oller in #78).

  • The roxy.r script was extended a little.

• Changes in package

  • Travis CI now uses R 4.0.0 and the bionic distro

CRANberries provides a comparison to the previous release. Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page. 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. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/littler | permanent link

Sun, 27 Oct 2019

littler 0.3.9: More nice new features

The tenth release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the thirteen-ish 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 more recently.

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 where 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 adds several new helper scripts / examples such as a Solaris-checker for rhub, a Sweave runner, and bibtex-record printer for packages. It also extends several existing scripts: render.r can now compact pdf files, build.r does this for package builds, tt.r covers parallel tinytest use, rcc.r reports the exit code from rcmdcheck, update.r corrects which package library directories it looks at, kitten.r can add puppies for tinytest, and thanks to Stefan the dratInsert.r (and render.r) script use call. correctly in stop().

The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.9 (2019-10-27)

• Changes in examples

  • The use of call. in stop() was corrected (Stefan Widgren in #72).

  • New script cos.r to check (at rhub) on Solaris.

  • New script compactpdf.r to compact pdf files.

  • The build.r script now compacts vignettes and resaves data.

  • The tt.r script now supports parallel tests and side effects.

  • The rcc.r script can now report error codes.

  • The '–libloc' option to update.r was updated.

  • The render.r script can optionally compact pdfs.

  • New script sweave.r to render (and compact) pdfs.

  • New script pkg2bibtex.r to show bibtex entries.

  • The kitten.r script has a new option --puppy to add tinytest support in purring packages.

CRANberries provides a comparison to the previous release. Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page. The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs and now of course all 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. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/littler | permanent link

Sun, 09 Jun 2019

littler 0.3.8: Several nice new features

The nineth release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the thirteen-ish 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 and predates Rscript. And it is (in my very biased eyes) better as 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 converted to only more recently.

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 where 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 extends the support for options("Ncpus") to the scripts install.r and install2.r (which has docopt support) making installation of CRAN packages proceed in parallel and thus quite a bit faster. We also added a new script to run tests from the excellent tinytest package, made the rhub checking scripts more robust to the somewhat incomplete latex support there, and updated some documentation.

The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.8 (2019-06-09)

• Changes in examples

  • The install.r and install2.r scripts now use parallel installation using options("Ncpu") on remote packages.

  • The install.r script has an expanded help text mentioning the environment variables it considers.

  • A new script tt.t was added to support tinytest.

  • The rhub checking scripts now all suppress builds of manual and vignettes as asking for working latex appears to be too much.

• Changes in package

  • On startup checks if r is in PATH and if not references new FAQ entry; text from Makevars mentions it too.

• Changes in documentation

  • The FAQ vignette now details setting r to PATH.

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

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/littler | permanent link

Fri, 15 Mar 2019

littler 0.3.7: Small tweaks

The eight release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the thirteen-ish 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 and predates Rscript. And it is (in my very biased eyes) better as it allows for piping as well shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript converted to rather recently.

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 where 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!).

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

This release brings an small update (thanks to Gergely) to scripts install2.r and installGithub.r allow more flexible setting of repositories, and fixes a minor nag from CRAN concerning autoconf programming style.

The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.6 (2019-01-26)

• Changes in examples

  • The scripts installGithub.r and install2.r get a new option -r | --repos (Gergely Daroczi in #67)

• Changes in build system

  • The AC_DEFINE macro use rewritten to please R CMD check.

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

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/littler | permanent link

Sat, 26 Jan 2019

littler 0.3.6: Two neat enhancements

The seventh release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the now more than twelve-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 and predates Rscript. And it is (in my very biased eyes) better as it allows for piping as well shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript converted to rather recently.

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 where 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!).

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

This release brings updates to the two (or three) scripts I use all the time to install or update packages. First, install.r (and install2.r) now recognise when they are in a source directory and will do the right thing when called without an argument there. They also recognise . in that. Second, Colin sent in a nice PR to use Ncpus for package installation in install2.r, which I then carried over to update.r. Now, if you add, say, options(Ncpus=4), to you startup file, installations and upgrade will operate in parallel which is nice. (That also made me realize that R had a microbug for which I sent this patch now in R-devel.) Lastly, we also started a new (and still very small) FAQ vignette about littler.

The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.6 (2019-01-26)

• Changes in examples

  • The scripts install.r and install2.r now support argument ".", and add it if called in a source directory.

  • The script install2.r can set Ncpus for install.packages() (Colin Gillespie in #63 fixing #62)

  • The script update.r can also set Ncpus for install.packages().

  • A new vignette "litter-faq" was added.

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

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/littler | permanent link

Thu, 04 Oct 2018

littler 0.3.5: Other kids broke my toys

The sixth release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the now more than twelve-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 and predates Rscript. And it is (in my very biased eyes) better as it allows for piping as well shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript converted to rather recently.

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 where 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!).

A few examples as highlighted at the Github repo:

This release updates two scripts I use all the time, and which were impacted by upstream changes in other packages they use. So roxy.r will now use the previous version of roxygen2 if found in ~/.R/cache – a location only otherwise used by this script. Similarly, rcmd.r needed an updated as rcmdcheck unexpectedly altered a function signature. A trivial rchk.r caller script was added to call the mostful rchk instance at rhub to test a source package.

The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.5 (2018-10-04)

• Changes in examples

  • The script roxy.r now uses cached copy of roxygen2 version 6.0.1 (if available) as the current version 6.1.0 changed behaviour.

  • The script rcc.r was updated as the underlying rcmdcheck changed parameter order.

  • A new simpler wrapper rchk.r was added to use RHub with the rchk image.

• Changes in package

  • Travis CI now uses the R 3.5 PPA

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

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/littler | permanent link

Fri, 24 Aug 2018

littler 0.3.4: More updated examples

The fifth release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the now more than ten-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 and predates Rscript. And it is (in my very biased eyes) better as it allows for piping as well shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript converted to rather recently.

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 where 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!).

A few examples as highlighted at the Github repo:

This release updates a few of examples scripts. One nice change is the most-excellent docopt package for command-line parsing no longer needs stringr and hence stringi for its operations, making our command-line scripts really lightweight as they now need only the (small) docopt package---thanks to Edwin de Jonge for all his work on that package. Also, Brandon Berterlsen contributed a script (which we later reduced to an option of an existing script) to only install not-yet-installed packages.

The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.4 (2018-08-24)

• Changes in examples

  • The shebang line is now #!/usr/bin/env r to work with either /usr/local/bin/r or /usr/bin/r.

  • New example script to only install packages not yet installed (Brandon Bertelsen in #59); later added into install2.r.

  • Functions getRStudioDesktop.r and getRStudioServer.r updated their internal URLs.

  • Several minor enhancements were made to example scripts.

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

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/littler | permanent link

Sun, 17 Dec 2017

littler 0.3.3

The fourth release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the now more than ten-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 and predates Rscript. In my very biased eyes better as it allows for piping as well shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. Last but not least it is also less silly than Rscript and always loads the methods package avoiding those bizarro bugs between code running in R itself and a scripting front-end.

littler prefers to live on Linux and Unix, has its difficulties on OS X due to yet-another-braindeadedness there (who ever thought case-insensitive filesystems where 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 welcome!).

A few examples as highlighted at the Github repo:

This release brings a few new examples scripts, extends a few existing ones and also includes two fixes thanks to Carl. Again, no internals were changed. The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.3 (2017-12-17)

• Changes in examples

  • The script installGithub.r now correctly uses the upgrade argument (Carl Boettiger in #49).

  • New script pnrrs.r to call the package-native registration helper function added in R 3.4.0

  • The script install2.r now has more robust error handling (Carl Boettiger in #50).

  • New script cow.r to use R Hub's check_on_windows

  • Scripts cow.r and c4c.r use #!/usr/bin/env r

  • New option --fast (or -f) for scripts build.r and rcc.r for faster package build and check

  • The build.r script now defaults to using the current directory if no argument is provided.

  • The RStudio getters now use the rvest package to parse the webpage with available versions.

• Changes in package

  • Travis CI now uses https to fetch script, and sets the group

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page. The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs off my littler page and the local directory here -- and now of course all 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.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/littler | permanent link

Thu, 16 Feb 2017

littler 0.3.2

The third release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the now more than ten-year history as a package started by Jeff in the summer of 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later.

littler is the first command-line interface for R and predates Rscript. It is still faster, and in my very biased eyes better as it allows for piping as well shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It prefers to live on Linux and Unix, has its difficulties on OS X due to yet-another-braindeadedness there (who ever thought case-insensitive filesystems where 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 welcome!).

This release brings several new examples script to run package checks, use the extraordinary R Hub, download RStudio daily builds, and more -- see below for details. No internals were changed.

The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.2 (2017-02-14)

• Changes in examples

  • New scripts getRStudioServer.r and getRStudioDesktop.r to download daily packages, currently defaults to Ubuntu amd64

  • New script c4c.r calling rhub::check_for_cran()

  • New script rd2md.r to convert Rd to markdown.

  • New script build.r to create a source tarball.

  • The installGitHub.r script now use package remotes (PR #44, #46)

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page. The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs off my littler page and the local directory here -- and now of course all 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.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/littler | permanent link

Sun, 07 Aug 2016

littler 0.3.1

The second release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the now more than ten-year history as a package started by Jeff in the summer of 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later.

littler is the first command-line interface for R and predates Rscript. It is still faster, and in my very biased eyes better as it allows for piping as well shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It prefers to live on Linux and Unix, has its difficulties on the OS X due yet-another-braindeadedness there (who ever thought case-insensitive filesystems where 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 welcome!).

This release brings us fixes and enhancements from three other contributors, a couple new example scripts, more robust builds, extended documentation and more -- see below for details.

The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.1 (2016-08-06)

• Changes in examples

  • install2.r now passes on extra options past -- to R CMD INSTALL (PR #37 by Steven Pav)

  • Added rcc.r to run rcmdcheck::rcmdcheck()

  • Added (still simple) render.r to render (R)markdown

  • Several examples now support the -x or --usage flag to show extended help.

• Changes in build system

  • The AM_LDFLAGS variable is now set and used too (PR #38 by Mattias Ellert)

  • Three more directories, used when an explicit installation directory is set, are excluded (also #38 by Mattias)

  • Travis CI is now driven via run.sh from our fork, and deploys all packages as .deb binaries using our PPA where needed

• Changes in package

  • SystemRequirements now mentions the need for libR, i.e. an R built with a shared library so that we can embed R.

  • The docopt and rcmdcheck packages are now suggested, and added to the Travis installation.

  • A new helper function r() is now provided and exported so that the package can be imported (closes #40).

  • URL and BugReports links were added to DESCRIPTION.

• Changes in documentation

  • The help output for installGithub.r was corrected (PR #39 by Brandon Bertelsen)

Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page.

The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs off my littler page and the local directory here -- and now of course all 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. will probably have new

Comments and suggestions are welcome at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/littler | permanent link

Thu, 29 Oct 2015

littler 0.3.0 -- on CRAN !!

A new major release of littler is now available. And for the first time in the nine years since 2006 when Jeff started the effort (which I joined not long after) we are now a CRAN package.

This required a rewrite of the build system, foregoing the calls to aclocal, autoheader, automake and leaving just a simpler autoconf layer creating a configure script and a simple src/Makevars.in. Not only does R provide such a robust and well-understood build system (which I got to understand reasonably well given all my R packages, but being on CRAN and leveraging its mechanism for installation and upgrades is clearly worth the change.

There may be a moment or two of transition. While we can create a binary in an R package, we cannot (generally) copy to /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin as part of the build process (for lack of write-rights to those directories). So if you do not have r in the $PATH and load the package, it makes a suggestion (which needs a linebreak which I added here):

R> library(littler)
The littler package provides 'r' as a binary.
You could link to the 'r' binary installed in
'/usr/local/lib/R/site-library/littler/bin/r' from
'/usr/local/bin' in order to use 'r' for scripting.
R> 

Similarly, you could copy (or softlink) r to ~/bin if that is in your $PATH.

The Debian (and Ubuntu) packages will continue to provide /usr/bin/r as before. Note thah these packages will now be called r-cran-littler to match all other CRAN packages.

The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.0 (2015-10-29)

• Changes in build system

  • First CRAN Release as R package following nine years of source releases

  • Script configure, src/Makevars.in and remainder of build system rewritten to take advantage of the R package build infrastructure

  • Reproducible builds are better supported as the (changing) compilation timestamps etc are only inserted for 'verbose builds' directly off the git repo, but not for Debian (or CRAN) builds off the release tarballs

• Changes in littler functionality

  • Also source $R_HOME/etc/Rprofile.site and ~/.Rprofile if present

• Changes in littler documentation

  • Added new vignette with examples

Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page.

The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs off my littler page and the local directory here -- and now of course all from its CRAN page and via install.packages("littler"). A fresh package has gone to the incoming queue at Debian where it will a few days as the binary packages was renamed from littler to r-cran-littler matching all other CRAN packages. Michael Rutter will probably have new Ubuntu binaries at CRAN once the source package gets into Debian proper.

Comments and suggestions are welcome at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/littler | permanent link

Sat, 14 Mar 2015

littler 0.2.3

A new minor release of littler is available now.

It adds or extends a number of things:

• added support for drat by adding a new example installDrat.r;

• the install.r, install2.r and check.r scripts now use getOption("repos") to set the default repos; this works well with drat and multiple repos set via, e.g. ~/.littler.r or /etc/littler.r;

• added support for installing Debian binaries as part of a check.r run, this can be particularly useful for one-command checks as done by some of the Rocker containers;

• added support for reproducible builds: if REPRODUCIBLE_BUILD is defined, no date and time stamp is added to the binary;

• added new command-line option -L|--libpath to expand the library path used for packages;

• added support for setting multiple repos from the command-line in the install2.r script;

• the manual page was updated with respect to recent additions;

• a link to the examples web page was added to the --usage output display;

See the littler examples page for more details.

Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page.

The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs off my littler page and the local directory here. A fresh package has gone to the incoming queue at Debian; Michael Rutter will probably have new Ubuntu binaries at CRAN in a few days too.

Comments and suggestions are welcome via the mailing list or issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/littler | permanent link

Fri, 30 Jan 2015

littler 0.2.2

A new minor release of littler is available now.

Several examples were added or extended:

• a new script check.r to check a source tarball with R CMD check after loading required packages first (and a good use case was given in the recent UBSAN testing with Rocker post);
• a new script to launch Shiny apps via runApp();
• a new feature to install.r and install2.r whereby source tarballs are recognized and installed directly
• new options to install.r and install2.r to set repos and lib location.

See the littler examples page for more details.

Another useful change is that r now reads either one (or both) of /etc/littler.r and ~/.littler.r. These are interpreted as standard R files, allowing users to provide initialization, package loading and more.

Carl Boettiger and I continue to make good use of these littler examples (to to install directly from CRAN or GitHub, or to run checks) in our Rocker builds of R for Docker.

Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page.

The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs off my littler page and the local directory here. A fresh package has gone to the incoming queue at Debian; Michael Rutter will probably have new Ubuntu binaries at CRAN in a few days too.

Comments and suggestions are welcome via the mailing list or issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/littler | permanent link

Sun, 19 Oct 2014

littler 0.2.1

A new maintenance release of littler is available now.

The main change are a few updates and extensions to the examples provided along with littler. Several of those continue to make use of the wonderful docopt package by Edwin de Jonge. Carl Boettiger and I are making good use of these littler examples, particularly to install directly from CRAN or GitHub, in our Rocker builds of R for Docker (about which we should have a bit more to blog soon too).

Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page.

The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs off my littler page and the local directory here. A fresh package has gone to the incoming queue at Debian; Michael Rutter will probably have new Ubuntu binaries at CRAN in a few days too.

Comments and suggestions are welcome via the mailing list or issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/littler | permanent link

Tue, 02 Sep 2014

littler is faster at doing nothing!

With yesterday's announcement of littler 0.2.0, I kept thinking about a few not-so-frequently-asked but recurring questions about littler. And an obvious one if of course the relationship to Rscript.

As we have pointed out before, littler preceded Rscript. Now, with Rscript being present in every R installation, it is of course by now more widely known.

But there is one important aspect which I stressed once or twice in the past and which bears repeating. Due to the lean and mean way in which littler is designed and set-up, it actually starts a lot faster than either Rscript or R. How, you ask? Well we actually query the environement at build time and hardcode a number of settings which R and Rscript re-acquire and learn each time they start. Which is more flexible. But slower.

So consider the following, really simple example. In it, we create a simple worker function f which launches the given (and simplest possible) R command of just quitting 250 times (by launching a shell command which loops). We then let littler, Rscript and R (in its just execute this expression mode) run this, and time it via one of the common benchmarking packages.

R> library(rbenchmark)
R> f <- function(cmd) { system(paste0("bash -c \"for i in \\$(seq 1 250); do ", cmd, " -e 'q()'; done\"")); }
R> res <- benchmark(f("r"), f("Rscript"), f("R --slave"), replications=5, order="relative")
R> res
            test replications elapsed relative user.self sys.self user.child sys.child
1         f("r")            5  32.256    1.000     0.001    0.004     26.538     5.706
2   f("Rscript")            5 180.154    5.585     0.001    0.004    152.751    28.522
3 f("R --slave")            5 302.714    9.385     0.001    0.004    270.569    33.098
R> 

So there: littler does "nothing" about five times as fast as Rscript, and about nine times as fast as R. Not that this matters greatly -- but when you design something for repeated (unsupervised) execution, say in a cronjob, it might as well be lightweight.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/littler | permanent link

Mon, 01 Sep 2014

littler 0.2.0

We are happy to announce a new release of littler.

A few minor things have changes since the last release:

• A few new examples were added or updated, including use of the fabulous new docopt package by Edwin de Jonge which makes command-line parsing a breeze.
• Other new examples show simple calls to help with sweave, knitr, roxygen2, Rcpp's attribute compilation, and more.
• We also wrote an entirely new webpage with usage example.
• A new option -d | --datastdin was added which will read stdin into a data.frame variable X.
• The repository has been move to this GitHub repo.
• With that, the build process was updated both throughout but also to reflect the current git commit at time of build.

Full details are provided at the ChangeLog

The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs off my littler page and the local directory here. A fresh package will got to Debian's incoming queue shortly as well.

Comments and suggestions are welcome via the mailing list or issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/littler | permanent link

Sat, 17 Sep 2011

littler 0.1.5

Brown-bag release time for littler. One of the minor cleanups in the 0.1.4 release from Thursday actually introduced a nasty little bug as you can't call Rf_KillAllDevices() when you do not have any graphics device. Doh.

So with apologies for the lower quality release, and the two hour malfuntioning window for CRANberries that it cause, a repaired version is now out there. The very brief (upstream) ChangeLog is as follows:

2011-09-17  Dirk Eddelbuettel  

        * configure.in: Mark as release 0.1.5

        * littler.c (littler_CleanUp): Remove call to Rf_KillAllDevices() 

littler provides r (pronounced littler), a shebang / scripting / quick eval / pipelining front-end to the the R language and data analysis environment.

As usual, our code is available via our svn archive or from tarballs off my littler page and the local directory here. A fresh package is in Debian's incoming queue and will hit mirrors shortly.

/code/littler | permanent link

Thu, 15 Sep 2011

littler 0.1.4

Matthias Klose, the tireless force behind the Debian / Ubuntu gcc, python, and what have you packages, sent me a minimal patch to let littler build when the ld linker uses the --as-needed option (as Ubuntu builds now do): all it took was a little reordering of arguments.

With that, I did a little cleanup as it has been a while since version 0.1.3. The brief (upstream) ChangeLog is as follows:

2011-09-15  Dirk Eddelbuettel  

        * configure.in: Mark as release 0.1.4

        * Makefile.am: Applied patch by Mathias Klose to prevent FTBFS with
          'ld --as-needed', cf LP bug 770980.

        * littler.c: A few small tweaks suggested by 'gcc -Wall'

        * examples/install2.r: Added a second R package installer example

        * examples/update.r: Switch to '/usr/bin/r -t' as shebang line
        * examples/fsizes.r: Dito

        * littler.c: Update copyrights to 2011
        * README: Idem

littler provides r (pronounced littler), a shebang / scripting / quick eval / pipelining front-end to the the R language and data analysis environment.

As usual, our code is available via our svn archive or from tarballs off my littler page and the local directory here. A fresh package is in Debian's incoming queue and will hit mirrors shortly.

/code/littler | permanent link