orderly_compare_packets: Compare the metadata and contents of two packets.

In orderly: Lightweight Reproducible Reporting

Compare the metadata and contents of two packets.

Description

Insignificant differences in the metadata (e.g., different dates and packet IDs) are excluded from the comparison.

Usage

orderly_compare_packets(
  target,
  current,
  location = NULL,
  allow_remote = NULL,
  fetch_metadata = FALSE,
  root = NULL
)

Arguments

target	The id of the packet to use in the comparison.
current	The id of the other packet against which to compare.
location	Optional vector of locations to pull from. We might in future expand this to allow wildcards or exceptions.
allow_remote	Logical, indicating if we should allow packets to be found that are not currently unpacked (i.e., are known only to a location that we have metadata from). If this is TRUE, then in conjunction with orderly_dependency() you might pull a large quantity of data. The default is NULL. This is TRUE if remote locations are listed explicitly as a character vector in the location argument, or if you have specified fetch_metadata = TRUE, otherwise FALSE.
fetch_metadata	Logical, indicating if we should pull metadata immediately before the search. If location is given, then we will pass this through to orderly_location_fetch_metadata() to filter locations to update. If pulling many packets in sequence, you will want to update this option to FALSE after the first pull, otherwise it will update the metadata between every packet, which will be needlessly slow.
root	The path to the root directory, or NULL (the default) to search for one from the current working directory. This function does not require that the directory is configured for orderly, and can be any outpack root (see orderly_init() for details).

Value

An object of class orderly_comparison. The object can be printed to get a summary description of the differences, or passed to orderly_comparison_explain() to display more details.

Examples

# Here are two packets that are equivalent, differing only in id
# and times:
path <- orderly_example()
id1 <- orderly_run("data", root = path)
id2 <- orderly_run("data", root = path)
orderly_compare_packets(id1, id2, root = path)

# A more interesting comparison:
id1 <- orderly_run("parameters", list(max_cyl = 6), root = path)
id2 <- orderly_run("parameters", list(max_cyl = 4), root = path)
cmp <- orderly_compare_packets(id1, id2, root = path)
cmp

# A verbose comparison will show differences in the constituent
# components of each packet:
orderly_comparison_explain(cmp, verbose = TRUE)

orderly documentation built on Jan. 24, 2026, 1:07 a.m.