Several weeks ago we introduced the drat package. Its name stands for drat R Archive Template, and it helps with easy-to-create and easy-to-use repositories for R packages. Two early blog posts describe drat: First Steps Towards Lightweight Repositories, and Publishing a Package, and since the previous release, a a guest post on drat was also added to the blog.

Several people have started to use drat to publish their packages, and this is a very encouraging sign. I also created a new repository and may have more to say about this in another post once I get time to write something up.

Today version 0.0.3 arrived on CRAN. It rounds out functionality, adds some fixes and brings more documentation:

• git support via git2r is improved; it is still optional (ie commit=TRUE is needed when adding packages) but plan to expand it
• several small bugs got fixed, including issues #9 and #7,
• four new vignettes got added, including two guests posts by Steven and Colin as well as two focusing, respectively, on drat for authors and and drat for users.

The work on the vignettes is clearly in progress as Colin’s guest post isn’t really finished yet, and I am not too impressed with how the markdown is rendered at CRAN so some may still become pdf files instead.

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.