RVignetteChanges

Installation

library(devtools)
install_github("RVignetteChanges", "rmflight")

Background

With the release of R 3.0.0, package authors have the opportunity to write vignettes using alternative engines than the default Sweave. For example, it is now possible to generate html vignettes using knitr.

Purpose

We would like to examine CRAN and Bioconductor R packages to track:

• if there is a change in the frequency of new packages that include vignettes (in the case of CRAN, where vignettes are optional)
• how many packages switch from Sweave to alternative vignette engines (CRAN and Bioconductor)

Frequency

The Bioconductor SVN repo is being crawled weekly, and a CRAN mirror is being queried weekly for changed packages.

Data availability

As of July 18 2013, summarized Bioconductor data is available as three matrices. For each package queried, is there a sweave (rnw) or markdown (rmd) vignette. Use load(bioconductorData) to load the data and examine it.

Functions to query the tar.gz files still need to be written.