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(This article was first published on <strong><a href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2017/04/06#003_follow_r-devel"> Thinking inside the box </a></strong>, and kindly contributed to <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers)</a> </div>
<p>Welcome to the third post in the <em>rarely relevant R recommendation</em> series, or <span><em>R</em><sup>4</sup></span> for short.</p>
<p>Today will be brief, but of some importance. In order to know where R is going next, few places provide a better vantage point than the actual ongoing development.</p>
<p>A few years ago, I mentioned to Duncan Murdoch how straightforward the setup of my <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2017/04/dirk.eddelbuettel.com/cranberries/">CRANberries feed (and site)</a> was. After all, static blog compilers converting textual input to html, rss feed and whatnot have been around for fifteen years (though they keep <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://gohugo.io/">getting reinvented</a>). He took this to heart and built the (not too pretty) <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://developer.r-project.org/blosxom.cgi/R-devel">R-devel daily site</a> (which also uses a fancy diff tool as it shows changes in <code>NEWS</code>) as well as a more <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://developer.r-project.org/RSSfeeds.html">general description</a> of all available sub-feeds. I follow this mostly through blog aggregations — Google Reader in its day, now <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://feedly.com/i/welcome">Feedly</a>. A screenshot is below just to show that it doesn’t have to be ugly just because it is on them intertubes:</p>
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<img src="https://i2.wp.com/dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2017/04/06/r-devel-in-feedly.png?w=456" data-recalc-dims="1">
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<p>This shows a particularly useful day when R-devel folded into the new branch for what will be the R 3.4.0 release come April 21. The list of upcoming changes is <em>truly</em> impressive and quite comprehensive — and the package registration helper, focus of posts <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2017/03/29#001_easy_package_registration">#1</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2017/03/30#002_even_easier_package_registration">#2</a> here, is but one of these many changes.</p>
<p>One function I learned about that day is <code>tools::CRAN_package_db()</code>, a helper to get a single (large) <code>data.frame</code> with <em>all</em> package DESCRIPTION information. Very handy. Others may have noticed that CRAN repos now have a new top-level file <code>PACKAGES.rds</code> and this function does indeed just fetch it–which you could do with a similar one-liner in R-release as well. Still very handy.</p>
<p>But do read about changes in R-devel and hence upcoming changes in R 3.4.0. Lots of good things coming our way.</p>
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This post by <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/">Dirk Eddelbuettel</a> originated on his <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/">Thinking inside the box</a> blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.</p>
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<div>To <strong>leave a comment</strong> for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: <strong><a href="http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2017/04/06#003_follow_r-devel"> Thinking inside the box </a></strong>.</div>
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