A new version of drat arrived on CRAN overnight, once again taking advantage of the fully automated process available for such packages with few reverse depends and no open issues. As we remarked at the last release fourteen months ago when we scored the same nice outcome: Being a simple package can have its upsides…

This release is mostly the work of Felix Ernst who took on what became a rewrite of how binary macOS packages are handled. If you need to distribute binary packages for macOS users, this may help. Two more small updates were made, see below for full details.

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 releases it is. drat is easy to use, documented by five vignettes and just works.

The NEWS file summarises the release as follows:

Changes in drat version 0.1.6 (2020-05-29)

• Changes in drat functionality

  • Support for the various (current) macOS binary formats was rewritten (Felix Ernst in #89 fixing #88).

  • Travis CI use was updated to R 4.0.0 and bionic (Dirk).

  • A drat repo was added to the README (Thomas Fuller in #86)

Courtesy of 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. 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.