RcppAPT: Rcpp Interface to APT Package Manager
Background
Debian and its derivatives likeUbuntu utilize a powerful package managing backend / frontend combination in APT (A Packaging Tool). Accessible at the command-line via front-endsapt,apt-get,apt-cache, … as well as numerous GUI variants, it is implemented using a librarylibapt-pkg. This small package providesR with access to this library viaRcpp.
Examples
We can query packages by regular expression:
which returns a data frame with name, version (if installed) and section.
We can also check for installability of a given package or set of packages:
which shows thatRcpp is (of course) available, but this (very new) package is (unsurprisingly) not available pre-built.
Moreover, we can look at the package information of a given package. ThebuildDepends() function extracts just the build dependencies:
R>buildDepends("r-cran-rcppeigen")[1]"debhelper""r-base-dev""cdbs"[4]"r-cran-rcpp""r-cran-matrix""r-cran-pkgkitten"R>TheshowSrc() anddumpPackages() functions display even more information.
We can also look at reverse dependencies:
R>reverseDepends("r-cran-rcpp$") package version1 r-cran-surveillance2 r-cran-rquantlib0.11.03 r-cran-reshape24 r-cran-readxl5 r-cran-rcppeigen0.11.0-16 r-cran-rcpparmadillo0.11.07 r-cran-plyr8 r-cran-minqa0.11.0R>Status
The package is still fairly small, and functionality is (currently) limited to the examples shown above. It builds reliably on the supported systems.
Butlibapt-pkg is pretty mature, and feature-rich, so this package acts mostly as a wrapper from R.
Installation
The package is onCRAN so a very standard
will do. Make sure you install thelibapt-pkg-dev package first as it is a build-dependency.
Versions of the package may also be available viadrat via:
Author
Dirk Eddelbuettel
License
GPL (>= 2)
Initially created: Sat Feb 21 09:07:45 CST 2015
Last modified: Sat May 30 08:26:30 CDT 2020