To assess stability for a package, pkgdiff has to compare all
releases of a package, and identify breaking changes between each release.
This comparison takes time, especially for packages that have been
active for many years.
Therefore, the first step of the function is to compare all releases
for each package in the input vector. The function will send messages
to the console to let you know which package it is currently comparing.
These messages will let you know how far the function is through the processing.
Once all the comparisons are completed, the function will return a data
frame summary of stability results. The data frame will have one
row for each package in the input vector. The data frame will also
show some information about the comparison, and give a stability assessment
for each package. The data frame columns are as follows:
Package: The package name.
FV: The first version of the package.
LV: The last version of the package.
FR: The first release date of the package.
LR: The last release date of the package.
TR: The total number of releases.
BR: The number of breaking releases.
Score: The stability score.
Assessment: The stability assessment.
To learn how the package stability score and assessment are calculated,
see vignette("pkgdiff-stability"). Additional information is
included in the documentation of the pkg_stability
function.
If a package is not found in the package cache, the function
will download and compare each version of the package on CRAN. This
process may increase the processing time. See vignette("pkg-cache")
and pkg_cache for additional information.
If a package does not exist on CRAN, a row for that package will still
be returned. However, all data values will be NA. This situation may
occur if a package exists on Github, but has not yet been submitted
to CRAN. The pkgdiff stability functions only work with packages
that have been published to CRAN.