Introduction to pkgdiff

Open Source languages have a reputation for being unstable. Package developers can remove a function or parameter at any time, potentially breaking thousands of programs that were using that function. The situation is quite different from languages like SAS or C, which are famous for their stability and backward compatibility.

The purpose of pkgdiff is to offer an objective approach for anticipating and avoiding breaking changes in R. It gives you a tool to evaluate contributed packages in terms of overall stability, and provides a way to identify and plan for future breakages.

The hope is that organizations will have a better way of selecting stable packages for their programmers, and programmers will cultivate higher standards for the packages they use. The end goal is to enable R's use in large scale, production environments, reduce maintenance costs, and increased confidence in the programs we write with R.

For an overview of the package, see the package web site here, or run the package vignette using the code vignette("pkgdiff").

Installation

To install pkgdiff, run the following command from your R console:

install.packages("pkgdiff")

Then put the following line at the top of your script:

library(pkgdiff)

The pkgdiff package will then be loaded, and available for use in your project.

For examples and usage information, please visit the pkgdiff documentation site here. These examples will demonstrate the extraordinary usefulness of the comparison functions, and give you many ideas on how and where to use the pkgdiff package.

Getting Help

If you need help with pkgdiff, the best place to turn to is the pkgdiff web site. This web site offers many examples, and full documentation on every function.

If you want to look at the code for pkgdiff, visit the github page here.

If you encounter a bug or have a feature request, please submit your issue here