CRAN Package Repository Tools

Description

Tools for obtaining information about current packages in the CRAN package repository, and their check status.

Usage

CRAN_package_db()

CRAN_check_results(flavors = NULL)
CRAN_check_details(flavors = NULL)
CRAN_check_issues()
summarize_CRAN_check_status(packages,
                            results = NULL,
                            details = NULL,
                            issues = NULL)

Arguments

Details

CRAN_package_db() returns a character data frame with most ‘DESCRIPTION’ metadata for the current packages in the CRAN package repository, including in particular the Description and Maintainer information not provided by utils::available.packages().

CRAN_check_results() returns a data frame with the basic CRAN package check results including timings, with columns Package, Flavor and Status giving the package name, check flavor, and overall check status, respectively.

CRAN_check_details() returns a data frame inheriting from class "check_details" (which has useful print and format methods) with details on the check results, providing check name, status and output for every non-OK check (via columns Check, Status and Output, respectively). Packages with all-OK checks are indicated via a * Check wildcard name and OK Status.

CRAN_check_issues() returns a character frame with additional check issues (including the memory-access check results made available from https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/bdr/memtests/ and the without-long-double check results from https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/bdr/noLD), as a character frame with variables Package, Version, kind (an identifier for the issue) and href (a URL with information on the issue).

CRAN_memtest_notes() is now deprecated, with its functionality integrated into that of CRAN_check_issues().

Value

See ‘Details’. Note that the results are collated on CRAN: currently this is done in a locale which sorts aAbB ....

Which CRAN?

The main functions access a CRAN mirror specified by the environment variable R_CRAN_WEB, defaulting to one specified in the ‘repositories’ file (see setRepositories): if that specifies @CRAN@ (the default) then https://CRAN.R-project.org is used. (Note that options("repos") is not consulted.)

Note that these access parts of CRAN under ‘web/contrib’ and ‘web/packages’ so if you have specified a mirror of just ‘src/contrib’ for installing packages you will need to set R_CRAN_WEB to point to a full mirror.

Examples

## This can be rather slow, especially with a non-local CRAN mirror
## and would fail (slowly) without Internet access in that case.

set.seed(11)  # but the packages chosen will change as soon as CRAN does.
pdb <- CRAN_package_db()
dim(pdb)
## DESCRIPTION fields included:
colnames(pdb)
## Summarize publication dates:
summary(as.Date(pdb$Published))
## Summarize numbers of packages according to maintainer:
summary(lengths(split(pdb$Package, pdb$Maintainer)))
## Packages with 'LASSO' in their Description:
pdb$Package[grepl("LASSO", pdb$Description)]

results <- CRAN_check_results()
## Available variables:
names(results)
## Tabulate overall check status according to flavor:
with(results, table(Flavor, Status))

details <- CRAN_check_details()
## Available variables:
names(details)
## Tabulate checks according to their status:
tab <- with(details, table(Check, Status))
## Inspect some installation problems:
bad <- subset(details,
              ((Check == "whether package can be installed") &
               (Status != "OK")))
## Show a random sample of up to 6
head(bad[sample(seq_len(NROW(bad)), NROW(bad)), ])

issues <- CRAN_check_issues()
head(issues)
## Show counts of issues according to kind:
table(issues[, "kind"])

## Summarize CRAN check status for 10 randomly-selected packages
## (reusing the information already read in):
pos <- sample(seq_len(NROW(pdb)), 10L)
summarize_CRAN_check_status(pdb[pos, "Package"],
                            results, details, issues)