Dirk Eddelbuettel

Sun, 26 Mar 2023

littler 0.3.18 on CRAN: New and Updated Scripts

max-heap image

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