A new version of drat just arrived on CRAN as another no-human-can-delay-this automatic upgrade directly from the CRAN prechecks (though I did need a manual reminder from Uwe to remove a now stale drat repo URL — bad @hrbrmstr — from the README in a first attempt).

This release is mostly the work of Neal Fultz who kindly sent me two squeaky-clean pull requests addressing two open issue tickets. As drat is reasonably small and simple, that was enough to motivate a quick release. I also ensured that PACKAGES.rds will always if committed along (if we’re in commit mode), which is a follow-up to an initial change from 0.1.3 in September.

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.

The NEWS file summarises the release as follows:

Changes in drat version 0.1.4 (2017-12-16)

• Changes in drat functionality

  • Binaries for macOS are now split by R version into two different directories (Neal Futz in #67 addring #64).

  • The target branch can now be set via a global option (Neal Futz in #68 addressing #61).

  • In commit mode, add file PACKAGES.rds unconditionally.

• Changes in drat documentation

  • Updated ‘README.md’ removing another stale example URL

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.