apicheck

apicheck is a small R package to explore the historical API of functions in CRAN packages. It is designed to help you work out minimum version requirements for packages mentioned in your DESCRIPTION file.

apicheck works by downloading package versions from CRAN and temporarily installing them in a special directory.

Installation

install.packages("remotes") 
# You'll need these:
remotes::install_github("hughjonesd/rcheology")
remotes::install_github("r-lib/pkgapi")

remotes::install_github("hughjonesd/apicheck")

Example

From clipr's NEWS file:

clipr 0.4.0 introduces dr_clipr():

library(apicheck)
fun_exists_at("clipr::dr_clipr", "0.4.0")
#> [1] TRUE
fun_exists_at("clipr::dr_clipr", "0.3.3")
#> [1] FALSE
when_fun_exists("clipr::dr_clipr", report = "brief") # binary search
#> [1] "0.4.0"

clipr 0.2.0 : several changes to write_clip.

api_same_at("clipr::write_clip", "0.2.0")
#> [1] TRUE
api_same_at("clipr::write_clip", "0.1.1")
#> [1] FALSE
when_api_same("clipr::write_clip", report = "full", search = "all") # check all versions
#>   version       date          result
#> 1   0.1.0 2015-09-02 Known different
#> 2   0.1.1 2015-09-04 Known different
#> 3   0.2.0 2015-10-06      Known same
#> 4   0.2.1 2016-06-23      Known same
#> 5   0.3.0 2016-11-19      Known same
#> 6   0.3.1 2016-12-02      Known same
#> 7   0.3.2 2017-01-09      Known same
#> 8   0.3.3 2017-06-19      Known same
#> 9   0.4.0 2017-11-03      Known same

To dig more deeply:

args(fun_at("clipr::write_clip", "0.1.1"))
#> function (content, sep = NULL, eos = NULL) 
#> NULL
args(fun_at("clipr::write_clip", "0.2.0"))
#> function (content, object_type = c("auto", "character", "table"), 
#>     breaks = NULL, eos = NULL, return_new = TRUE, ...) 
#> NULL
help_at("clipr::write_clip", "0.1.1")

To see all changes between two versions, use compare_versions:

cv <- compare_versions("clipr", "0.1.1", "0.2.0")
summary(cv)
#> Version 1: 0.1.1 
#> Version 2: 0.2.0 
#> # A tibble: 2 x 5
#>   function_1 function_2 change      api_1                           api_2 
#>   <chr>      <chr>      <chr>       <chr>                           <chr> 
#> 1 <NA>       clear_clip Added       ""                              ""    
#> 2 write_clip write_clip API changed content, sep = NULL, eos = NULL "cont…

You can also check base packages, using the info from rcheology:

fun_exists_at("base::paste0", "2.14.0")
#> [1] FALSE
fun_exists_at("base::paste0", "2.15.0")
#> [1] TRUE

Performance

Performance tests.