In Ironholds/practice: Tools for identifying whether R packages follow common software engineering conventions

The practice package provides some datasets, particularly about CRAN, that make it easier to use. For maximum transparency, it is set up to construct these datasets using its own functions.

library(practice)

CRAN Metadata

For example, the CRANmetadata object contains a list of lists, each representing metadata information about a CRAN package. It ships with the practice package.

str(CRANmetadata, max.level = 1, list.len = 6)
str(CRANmetadata[[1]], max.level = 2)

You can create or update this data yourself, using the update_CRAN_metadata() function:

practice:::update_CRAN_metadata(verbose = TRUE)

Note: as you might expect, this will take several minutes! You can always explore the pre-built CRANmetadata object first and update later at your convenience. If you do update the object, remember to re-install the package via, e.g. devtools::install().

Package sources

The sources of CRAN packages do not come included with the package, since they're ~ 5 GB and counting. However, practice provides a function to download them yourself:

download_packages(get_package_names(), "cran_sources", quiet = FALSE)

This will download the sources of all packages into the cran_sources directory.

Package practices

The CRANpractices dataset contains information on all CRAN packages and whether they follow software engineering practices. Once the package sources are downloaded as above, it can be created with:

practice:::update_CRAN_practices(src_dir = "cran_sources")

(This takes about two minutes). The data looks like:

library(practice)
library(dplyr)

CRANpractices

You can use it to answer questions about the frequency of particular practices:

CRANpractices %>%
  count(license) %>%
  arrange(desc(n))

CRANpractices %>%
  count(vignette_format, vignette_builder) %>%
  ungroup() %>%
  arrange(desc(n))

Ironholds/practice documentation built on May 7, 2019, 6:41 a.m.