There are many R packages on CRAN (1735 as of this writing). There are updates to existing packages almost every day, and new packages are added regularly. Major updates and new packages are sometimes announced on the r-packages mailing list, but not always.
An easy way to keep up-to-date with this activity is to subscribe to the CRANberries RSS feed, created by Dirk Eddelbuettel. You can also view the entries directly at the CRANberries webpage. The feed (and page) includes notifications of every package added to or updated on CRAN.
There are a couple of limitations. First of all, it doesn't track packages in repositories other than CRAN (like Bioconductor). Also, it would be nice to see the details of the changes (such as the diff of the NEWS file -- right now it simply reports files that have changed). Nonetheless, it's a great service and an easy add to your favourite RSS reader.
Here's a typical entry for an updated package:
Author: Stephen Milborrow
Title: Plot principal component histograms around a scatter plot.
Description: Plot principal component histograms around a bivariate
scatter plot.
Diff between plotpc versions 1.0-1 dated 2009-03-10 and 1.0-2 dated 2009-03-23
DESCRIPTION | 23 +++++++++++++----------
NEWS | 5 +++++
R/plotld.R | 5 ++++-
man/plotld.Rd | 11 ++++++++---
man/plotpc.Rd | 21 ++++++++++++---------
tests/tests/test.plotpc.R | 3 ++-
tests/tests/test.plotpc.Rout.save | 5 +++--
7 files changed, 47 insertions(+), 26 deletions(-)
And here's a typical entry for a new package:
Package: HadoopStreaming
Type: Package
Title: Utilities for using R scripts in Hadoop streaming
Version: 0.1
Date: 2009-03-16
Author: David S. Rosenberg
Maintainer: David S. Rosenberg
Depends: getopt
Description: Provides a framework for writing map/reduce scripts for use in Hadoop Streaming. Also facilitates operating on data in a streaming fashion, without Hadoop.
License: GPL
Packaged: Sat Mar 21 11:42:46 2009; drosen
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2009-03-23 11:09:20
More information about HadoopStreaming at CRAN
Cool. Wasn't aware of this.
What would be really nice, although I don't know if it would translate well for R packages, would be something like http://osx.iusethis.com/, which has RSS feeds I subscribe to that tell me about new mac apps, hot mac apps, etc., but also has a nice interface that allows user comments for the apps and suggests similar apps. I think a lot of people (myself included) are not very aware of all that is available. I guess this is what the task views are for, but I don't find myself visiting them that much.
A start on this is Hadley Wickham's crantastic.org.
Posted by: Ryan | March 25, 2009 at 18:30