The prrd package was introduced recently, and made it to CRAN shortly thereafter. The idea of prrd is simple, and described in some more detail on its webpage and its GitHub repo. Reverse dependency checks are an important part of package development and is easily done in a (serial) loop. But these checks are also generally embarassingly parallel as there is no or little interdependency between them (besides maybe shared build depedencies). See the following screenshot (running six parallel workers, arranged in split byobu session).

This note announce the second, and much improved, release. The package now runs on all operating systems supported by R and no longer has external system requirements. Several functions were improved, two new helper functions were added in a so-far still preliminary form, and everything is more robust now.

The release is summarised in the NEWS entry:

Changes in prrd version 0.0.2 (2018-01-24)

• The package no longer require wget.

• Enhanced sanity checker function.

• Expanded and improved dequeue function.

• No longer use $HOME in xvfb-run-safe (#2).

• The use of xvfb-run use is now conditional on the OS (#3).

• The set of available packages is no longer constrained to CRAN, but could be via the local setup script (#4).

• The dequeue() function now uses system2().

• The enqueue() functions checks if no reverse dependencies are found and stops (#6).

• The enqueue() functions checks for repository information being set (#5).

CRANberries provides the usual summary of changes to the previous version. See the aforementioned webpage and its repo for details. For more questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.