'Rcpp' Interface to the APT Package Manager.
RcppAPT: Rcpp Interface to APT Package Manager
Background
Debian and its derivatives like Ubuntu utilize a powerful package managing backend / frontend combination in APT (A Packaging Tool). Accessible at the command-line via front-ends apt, apt-get, apt-cache, ... as well as numerous GUI variants, it is implemented using a library libapt-pkg. This small package provides R with access to this library via Rcpp.
Examples
We can query packages by regular expression:
R> library(RcppAPT)
R> getPackages("^r-base-.")
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:
R> hasPackages(c("r-cran-rcpp", "r-cran-rcppapt"))
r-cran-rcpp r-cran-rcppapt
TRUE FALSE
R>
which shows that Rcpp 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. The buildDepends() 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>
The showSrc() and dumpPackages() functions display even more information.
We can also look at reverse dependencies:
R> reverseDepends("r-cran-rcpp$")
package version
1 r-cran-surveillance
2 r-cran-rquantlib 0.11.0
3 r-cran-reshape2
4 r-cran-readxl
5 r-cran-rcppeigen 0.11.0-1
6 r-cran-rcpparmadillo 0.11.0
7 r-cran-plyr
8 r-cran-minqa 0.11.0
R>
Status
The package is still fairly small, and functionality is (currently) limited to the examples shown above. It builds reliably on the supported systems.
But libapt-pkg is pretty mature, and feature-rich, so this package acts mostly as a wrapper from R.
Installation
The package is on CRAN so a very standard
install.packages("RcppAPT")
will do. Make sure you install the libapt-pkg-dev package first as it is a build-dependency.
Versions of the package may also be available via drat via:
drat:::add("eddelbuettel")
install.packages("RcppAPT")
Author
Dirk Eddelbuettel
License
GPL (>= 2)