Get notified about new package versions

Package Use Questions
1

There is a new service called Sibbell that sends you emails when there are new releases for GitHub repositories that you either star or watch. It’s a free service.

We try for all of our R packages to tag each new version that goes to CRAN, and associate notes about what has changed with that version in the releases page for the package. For example, here’s the most recent release for rgbif https://github.com/ropensci/rgbif/releases/tag/v0.8.6

If you are on Twitter, we announce all or most of these releases, so that’s one way. But if you aren’t, or prefer email, Sibbell is a great way to get notified when there’s new versions of rOpenSci packages.

2

I used to “subscribe” to new releases on GH for a number of R packages (like ggplot and yaml) via RSS, but this is extremely suboptimal – it requires the package developers to create tags in git or new releases on GH, which is often missing for most R pacakges.

So then I wrote a script, which checked package version on CRAN – but now we have METACRAN with a pretty decent API, which is a lot more convenient tool to do so.

3

@daroczig Right, metacran, and there’s Cranberries as well.

Though this is a solution that works for non-R things as well.