R Checkpoint Package Update Now in Beta

Hong Ooi announces that a revamp of the checkpoint package is now in beta:

Checkpoint has been around for nearly 6 years now, helping R users solve the reproducible research puzzle. In that time, it’s seen many changes, new features, and, inevitably, bug reports. Some of these bugs have been fixed, while others remain outstanding in the too-hard basket.

Many of these issues spring from the fact that it uses only base R functions, in particular install.packages, to do its work. The problem is that install.packages is meant for interactive use, and as an API, is very limited. For starters, it doesn’t return a result to the caller—instead, checkpoint has to capture and parse the printed output to determine whether the installation succeeded. This causes a host of problems, since the printout will vary based on how R is configured. Similarly, install.packages refuses to install a package if it’s in use, which means checkpoint must unload it first—an imperfect and error-prone process at best.

In addition to these, checkpoint’s age means that it has accumulated a significant amount of technical debt over the years. For example, there is still code to handle ancient versions of R that couldn’t use HTTPS, even though the MRAN site (in line with security best practice) now accepts HTTPS connections only.

Click through to see what’s in the new checkpoint package.