Dirk Eddelbuettel

Sat, 10 Jul 2021

drat 0.2.1: Small Tweak

drat user

A new minor release of drat arrived on CRAN overnight. This is a minor update relative to the 0.2.0 release in April. This release will now create an empty file index.html in the top-level (when initRepo() is called), and check for presence of such a file when adding files to a repo (via insertPackage()). This helps to avoid getting ‘404’ results when (perfectly valid) drat repos are checking by accessing the top-level URL, as for example CRAN does when testing if an Additional_repositoiries is reachable. The ‘step-by-step’ vignette had already suggested creating one by hand, this is now done programmatically (and one is present in the repo suggsted to fork from too).

drat stands for drat R Archive Template, and helps with easy-to-create and easy-to-use repositories for R packages. Since its inception in early 2015 it has found reasonably widespread adoption among R users because repositories with marked releases is the better way to distribute code. See below for a few custom reference examples.

Because for once it really is as your mother told you: Friends don’t let friends install random git commit snapshots. Properly rolled-up releases it is. Just how CRAN shows us: a model that has demonstrated for two-plus decades how to do this. And you can too: drat is easy to use, documented by six vignettes and just works.

The NEWS file summarises the release as follows:

Changes in drat version 0.2.1 (2021-07-09)

  • Two internal functions now have a note in their documentation stating them as not exported (Dirk in response to #123)

  • Repositories created by initRepo now have an placeholder index.html to not trigger a curl check at CRAN (Dirk)

  • Adding to a repository now checks for a top-level index.html and displays a message if missing (Dirk)

  • The DratStepByStep.Rmd vignette mentions the added index.html file

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More detailed information is on the drat page.

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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