A new version of drat arrived on CRAN yesterday. Once again, this release is mostly the work of Felix Ernst who extended some work from the previous release, and added support for repository updates (outside of package insertion) and more.

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.

As your mother told you: Friends don’t let friends install random git commit snapshots. Rolled-up releases it is. drat is easy to use, documented by five vignettes and just works.

The NEWS file summarises the release as follows:

Changes in drat version 0.1.7 (2020-07-10)

• Functions insertPackages, archivePackages and prunePackages are now vectorised (Patrick Schratz and Felix Ernst in #93, #100).

• The new functionality is supported by unit tests (Felix Ernst in #93, and #102 fixing #101).

• Added new function updateRepo (Felix Ernst in #95, #97).

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More detailed information is on the drat page.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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