A new version of drat just arrived on CRAN. And like the last time in December 2017 it went through as an automatically processed upgrade directly from the CRAN prechecks. Being a simple package can have its upsides…

And like the last time, this release once again draws largely upon contributed pull requests. Neal Fultz cleaned up how Windows paths are handled when inserting Windows (binary) packages. And Christoph Stepper extended the support for binary packages the helper commands pruneRepo and archivePackages. I added a minor cleanup to a test Neal added in the previous version, and that made a quick and simple release!

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.

As your mother told you: Friends don’t let friends install random git commit snapshots. Rolled-up release it is. And despite what some (who may not know it well) say, drat is actually rather easy to use, documented by five vignettes and just works.

The NEWS file summarises the release as follows:

Changes in drat version 0.1.5 (2019-03-28)

• Changes in drat functionality

  • Windows paths are handled better when inserting packages (Neal Fultz in #70)

  • Binary packages are now supported for the pruneRepo and archivePackages commands (Christoph Stepper in #79).

• Changes in drat documentation

  • Properly prefix R path in system call in a tests (Dirk in minor cleanup to #70).

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

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