README.md

In robertdj/pkg.peek: Peek into R Package Archives

pkg.peek

R packages are bundled in a tar.gz, a tgz or a zip archive. Information about a package is included in the archive and {pkg.peek} can help to extract it.

Installation

{pkg.peek} is only on GitHub and can be installed using the remotes package with the command:

remotes::install_github("robertdj/pkg.peek")

Example

Archives come in two forms: Compiled or only with source code.

If the archive is created with e.g. devtools::build(binary = FALSE) it only contains the source code and it is a tar.gz file.

If the archive is created with e.g. devtools::build(binary = TRUE) all code in the package is compiled and the file type depends on the operating system used to perform the compilation. Such a compiled package is specific to the operating system -- a package compiled on Linux cannot be used on macOS.

A compiled package archive contains information about the operating system and R used to compile it. As an example, {pkg.peek} has a function to extract the version of R used for compilation:

pkg.peek::get_r_version("<path/to/package_archive>")

robertdj/pkg.peek documentation built on Aug. 30, 2021, 5:42 p.m.