The twentyfirst release of
littler as a
CRAN package
landed on CRAN just now, following in the now eighteen 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 contains another fair number of small changes and
improvements to some of the scripts I use daily to build or test
packages, adds a new front-end
ciw.r
for the
recently-released
ciw package
offering a CRAN Incoming Watcher , a new helper
installDeps2.r
(extending
installDeps.r
), a
new doi-to-bib converter, allows a different temporary directory setup I
find helpful, deals with one corner deployment use, and more.
The full change description follows.
Changes in littler
version 0.3.20 (2024-03-23)
- Changes in examples scripts
- New (dependency-free) helper
installDeps2.r
to
install dependencies
- Scripts
rcc.r
, tt.r
,
tttf.r
, tttlr.r
use env
argument
-S
to set -t
to r
tt.r
can now fill in inst/tinytest
if
it is present
- New script
ciw.r
wrapping new package ciw
tttf.t
can now use devtools
and its loadall
- New script
doi2bib.r
to call the DOI converter REST
service (following a skeet by Richard McElreath)
- Changes in package
- The CI setup uses checkout@v4 and the r-ci-setup action
- The Suggests: is a little tighter as we do not list all packages
optionally used in the the examples (as R does not check for it
either)
- The package load messag can account for the rare build of R under
different architecture (Berwin Turlach in #117 closing
#116)
- In non-vanilla mode, the temporary directory initialization in
re-run allowing for a non-standard temp dir via config settings
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 as
well as (in a day or two)
Ubuntu binaries at
CRAN thanks to the tireless Michael Rutter.
Comments and suggestions are welcome at the
GitHub repo.
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can
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.