Monday, May 26, 2025 From rOpenSci (https://ropensci.org/blog/2025/05/26/news-may-2025/). Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under the CC-BY license.
Dear rOpenSci friends, it’s time for our monthly news roundup! You can read this post on our blog. Now let’s dive into the activity at and around rOpenSci!
You might know of our {pkgcheck} system used for our automated package checks, and for your own stand-alone and GitHub-action usage on any package. We are seeking co-maintainers for the {pkgcheck} package which powers this system. In particular, we have several ideas for additional checks in current repo issues. We would like volunteers to attend an online get-together for us to coach you on how to implement new checks, and so to help you get involved in maintaining and further developing our checking system. If you’re interested and already part of the rOpenSci Slack, please join our dedicated #pkgcheck channel, otherwise email [email protected].
The call for the first cohort in Spanish has closed. We received 121 aplications from people in 22 different countries. Most of this year’s applicants want to develop a new package and the topics are very varied: from data access, to new analytics, educational materials, to health and agricultural applications. The review process is in full swing. Notifications will be going out over the next few weeks to all those who applied. We greatly appreciate the time all applicants took to write and submit their proposals. We can’t wait to see what this year’s cohort will bring to the program!
Read all about coworking!
And remember, you can always cowork independently on work related to R, work on packages that tend to be neglected, or work on what ever you need to get done!
The following two packages recently became a part of our software suite:
forcis, developed by Nicolas Casajus together with Mattia Greco, Sonia Chaabane, Xavier Giraud, and Thibault de Garidel-Thoron: Provides an interface to the FORCIS database (Chaabane et al. (2024) https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7390791) on global foraminifera distribution. This package allows to download and to handle FORCIS data. It is part of the FRB-CESAB working group FORCIS. https://www.fondationbiodiversite.fr/en/the-frb-in-action/programs-and-projects/le-cesab/forcis/. It is available on CRAN. It has been reviewed by Air Forbes and Scott Chamberlain.
promoutils, developed by Steffi LaZerte: Utility functions for accessing GitHub and social media data.
Discover more packages, read more about Software Peer Review.
The following eleven packages have had an update since the last newsletter: frictionless (v1.2.1), c3dr (v0.1.5), excluder (v0.5.2), fellingdater (v1.0.3), fireexposuR (v1.1.0), forcis (1.0.1), geotargets (v0.3.1), stplanr (overlapping_segments_in_overline), tarchetypes (0.13.1), targets (1.11.3), and tinkr (0.3.0).
There are fourteen recently closed and active submissions and 4 submissions on hold. Issues are at different stages:
One at ‘6/approved’:
Two at ‘4/review(s)-in-awaiting-changes’:
pkgmatch, Find R Packages Matching Either Descriptions or Other R Packages. Submitted by mark padgham.
sits, Satellite Image Time Series Analysis for Earth Observation Data Cubes. Submitted by Gilberto Camara.
Four at ‘3/reviewer(s)-assigned’:
PFW, Tools for Filtering and Processing Data from Project FeederWatch. Submitted by Mason Maron.
SSARP, SSARP (Species-/Speciation-Area Relationship Projector). Submitted by kmartinet.
sasquatch, Use SAS, R, and quarto Together. Submitted by Ryan Zomorrodi.
read.abares, Provides simple downloading, parsing and importing of Australian. Submitted by Adam H. Sparks.
Three at ‘2/seeking-reviewer(s)’:
trud, Query the NHS TRUD API. Submitted by Alasdair Warwick.
distionary, Create and Evaluate Probability Distributions. Submitted by Vincenzo Coia.
galamm, Generalized Additive Latent and Mixed Models. Submitted by Øystein Sørensen. (Stats).
Four at ‘1/editor-checks’:
partialling.out, Residuals from partial regressions. Submitted by Marc Bosch. (Stats).
dataset, Create Data Frames that are Easier to Exchange and Reuse. Submitted by Daniel Antal.
capybara, Fast and Memory Efficient Fitting of Linear Models With High-Dimensional Fixed Effects. Submitted by Mauricio “Pachá” Vargas Sepúlveda.
dataset, Create Data Frames that are Easier to Exchange and Reuse. Submitted by Daniel Antal.
Find out more about Software Peer Review and how to get involved.
If you’re interested in maintaining any of the R packages below, you might enjoy reading our blog post What Does It Mean to Maintain a Package?.
hddtools, Hydrological Data Discovery Tools. Issue for volunteering.
USAboundaries (and USAboundariesdata), historical and contemporary boundaries of the United States of America. Issue for volunteering.
historydata, datasets for historians. Issue for volunteering.
Refer to our help wanted page – before opening a PR, we recommend asking in the issue whether help is still needed.
Some useful tips for R package developers. 👀
Interesting opportunity starting next week, read more on the R Forwards website:
“The Forwards teaching team is hosting two workshop series beginning next month to teach participants how to build their own R packages. No prior package building experience is required.”
"Cohort 1 meets every other Monday starting June 2, from 09:00 to 10:30 UTC and will be taught by Pao Corrales and Ella Kaye. Cohort 2 meets every other Tuesday starting June 3, from 14:30 to 16:00 UTC and will be led by Emma Rand, Joyce Robbins, and Heather Turner."
In our recent blog post we explained what ROR IDs are: they are to organizations what ORCID are for individuals. They help acknowledge more precisely an organization (a company that owns the copyright, a non-profit that funded the work, etc.) in the package’s metadata. Read more.
Or, in other words, how to have your package not fail R CMD check on CRAN, but examples and vignettes still rendered in pkgdown documentation?
Thanks to Alasdair Warwick, maintainer of the recently reviewed gtexr package, for summarizing some advice that we share here:
examplesIf roxygen2 tag with the IN_PKGDOWN variable e.g. #' @examplesIf identical(Sys.getenv("IN_PKGDOWN"), "true")IN_PKGDOWN variable with knitr eval option e.g.knitr::opts_chunk$set(
collapse = TRUE,
comment = "#>",
eval = Sys.getenv("IN_PKGDOWN") == "true"
)
Examples:
examplesIf: https://github.com/ropensci/gtexr/blob/592ac781672f07eb67e935d4155570c5960d1fdb/R/get_service_info.R#L14 (see also Docs of the roxygen2 tag: https://roxygen2.r-lib.org/articles/rd.html?q=examplesIf#examples)To follow up on last newsletter’s item "🔗 CI: Pin the R version if using renv", a tip by Hugo Gruson: it’s also possible to automatically set the R version to the one documented in renv.lock when using the r-lib/setup-raction.
usethis::use_air()In March we mentioned Air, the new formatter developed at Posit. In usethis development version, there’s a function that helps you set up a project to use Air: use_air(). See also the issue about the JSON config.
Breaking news: a new vcr version is in the works! Follow the activity by Hadley Wickham and Scott Chamberlain in vcr’s GitHub repository, check out the new local_cassette() function… Or just wait for the next release! 😸
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