Just about a week ago @thosjleeper posited something on twitter w\/r\/t how many CRAN packages had associations with GitHub (i.e. how many used GitHub for development). The `DESCRIPTION` file (that comes with all R packages) has some fields that can house this information and most folks who do use GitHub for development of R seem to use the `URL` field to host the repository URL, which looks something like this:<\/p>\n
`URL: http:\/\/github.com\/ropenscilabs\/geoparser`<\/p>\n
(that’s from @ma_salmon’s ++good `geoparser` package)<\/p>\n
There may be traces of GitHub URLs in other fields, but I took this initial na\u00efve assumption and added a step to my daily home CRAN mirror scripts (what, you don’t have your own CRAN mirror at home, too?) to generate two files that you, the R community, can use whenever you want to inspect GitHub R packages:<\/p>\n
– [`http:\/\/public-r-data.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com\/ghcran.Rdata`](http:\/\/public-r-data.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com\/ghcran.Rdata) (R data file)
\n– [`http:\/\/public-r-data.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com\/ghcran.json`](http:\/\/public-r-data.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com\/ghcran.json) (json file)<\/p>\n
You can use:<\/p>\n
`load(url(“http:\/\/public-r-data.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com\/ghcran.Rdata”))`<\/p>\n
or<\/p>\n
`jsonlite::fromJSON(“http:\/\/public-r-data.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com\/ghcran.json”)` <\/p>\n
to read these files but they change only daily, so you might want to `download.file()` them vs waste bandwidth re-reading them intra-day.<\/p>\n
As of this post there were 1,544 packages meeting my na\u00efve criteria. <\/p>\n
One interesting side-discovery of this effort was to discover that there are 122 “distinct” `DESCRIPTION` fields in-use, but some of those are mixed-case versions of each other (118 total unique ones). Plus, there doesn’t seem to be as hard and fast a rule on the fields as one might think. Some examples:<\/p>\n
– `acknowledgement`, `acknowledgements`, `acknowledgments`
\n– `bioviews`, `biocviews`
\n– `keyword`, `keywords`
\n– `reference`, `references`, `reference manual`
\n– `systemrequirement`, `systemrequirements`, `systemrequirementsnote`<\/p>\n
You can see the usage counts for all the fields in the table below:<\/p>\n