CRAN Package Repository Tools

Description

Tools for obtaining information about current packages in the CRAN package repository, and their check status.

Usage

CRAN_package_db()

CRAN_check_results(flavors = NULL)
CRAN_check_details(flavors = NULL)
CRAN_check_issues()
summarize_CRAN_check_status(packages,
                            results = NULL,
                            details = NULL,
                            issues = NULL)

Arguments

Details

CRAN_package_db() returns a data frame with character columns containing most ‘DESCRIPTION’ metadata for the current packages in the CRAN package repository, including in particular the Description and Maintainer information not provided by utils::available.packages().

CRAN_check_results() returns a data frame with the basic CRAN package check results including timings, with columns Package, Flavor and Status giving the package name, check flavor, and overall check status, respectively.

CRAN_check_details() returns a data frame inheriting from class "check_details" (which has useful print and format methods) with details on the check results, providing check name, status and output for every non-OK check (via columns Check, Status and Output, respectively). Packages with all-OK checks are indicated via a * Check wildcard name and OK Status.

CRAN_check_issues() returns a character frame with additional check issues (including the memory-access check results made available from https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/bdr/memtests/) as a character frame with variables Package, Version, kind (an identifier for the issue) and href (a URL with information on the issue).

Value

See ‘Details’. Note that the results are collated on CRAN: currently this is done in a locale which sorts aAbB ....

Which CRAN?

The main functions access a CRAN mirror specified by the environment variable R_CRAN_WEB, defaulting to one specified in the "repos" option. Otherwise the entry in the ‘repositories’ file (see setRepositories) is used: if that specifies ‘⁠@CRAN@⁠’ (the default) or does not contain an entry for CRAN then https://CRAN.R-project.org is used.

The mirror to be used is reported by utils::findCRANmirror("web").

Note that these functions access parts of CRAN under ‘web/contrib’ and ‘web/packages’ so if you have specified a mirror of just ‘src/contrib’ for installing packages you will need to set R_CRAN_WEB to point to a full mirror.

Internal functions CRAN_aliases_db, CRAN_archive_db, CRAN_current_db and CRAN_rdxrefs_db (used by R CMD check) use R_CRAN_SRC rather than R_CRAN_WEB.

Examples

## This can be rather slow  with a non-local CRAN mirror
## and might fail (slowly) without Internet access in that case.

set.seed(11)  # but the packages chosen will change as soon as CRAN does.
pdb <- CRAN_package_db()
dim(pdb)
## DESCRIPTION fields included:
colnames(pdb)
## Summarize publication dates:
summary(as.Date(pdb$Published))
## Summarize numbers of packages according to maintainer:
summary(lengths(split(pdb$Package, pdb$Maintainer)))
## Packages with 'LASSO' in their Description:
pdb$Package[grepl("LASSO", pdb$Description)]

results <- CRAN_check_results()
## Available variables:
names(results)
## Tabulate overall check status according to flavor:
with(results, table(Flavor, Status))

details <- CRAN_check_details()
## Available variables:
names(details)
## Tabulate checks according to their status:
tab <- with(details, table(Check, Status))
## Inspect some installation problems:
bad <- subset(details,
              ((Check == "whether package can be installed") &
               (Status != "OK")))
## Show a random sample of up to 6
head(bad[sample(seq_len(NROW(bad)), NROW(bad)), ])

issues <- CRAN_check_issues()
head(issues)
## Show counts of issues according to kind:
table(issues[, "kind"])

## Summarize CRAN check status for 10 randomly-selected packages
## (reusing the information already read in):
pos <- sample(seq_len(NROW(pdb)), 10L)
summarize_CRAN_check_status(pdb[pos, "Package"],
                            results, details, issues)