R Observatory: Metrics for pkgbuild version 1.4.8

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

pkgbuild

1.4.8Package record

Find Tools Needed to Build R Packages

19packages dependsuggested by 29

12.3Mdownloads / year

60.6%test coverage

13/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Gábor CsárdiCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Website ↗Issues ↗Declared funder: Posit Software, PBC

Provides functions used to build R packages. Locates compilers needed to build R packages on various platforms and ensures the PATH is configured appropriately so R can use them.

Changes in 1.4.8

New Config/build/never-clean DESCRIPTION option to avoid adding --preclean to R CMD INSTALL (e.g., when header files have changed) (@krlmlr, #204).
has_rtools() & co. now work correctly on aarch64 Windows, when RTOOLS45_AARCH64_HOME is not set (@remlapmot, #203).
pkg_build() and pkgbuild_process now work corrently when building binary packages from non-standard file names (#208).

From NEWS.md in the release

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)Fedora (COPR)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("pkgbuild", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("r-lib/pkgbuild")

Development version from r-lib/pkgbuild. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-pkgbuild

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled. We list this channel from recorded r2u download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-pkgbuild

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-pkgbuild

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed). We list this channel from recorded autoCRAN download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

CRAN check page ↗

Slowest check: 2.2 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Status changes

OK13 OK2026-08-05
NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-08-01
OK12 OK2026-06-08
ERROR12 OK, 1 ERROR2026-06-07
OK14 OK2026-03-10

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 1.4.8

READMEYes · 547 wordsVignettesNoNEWSYes · 100% structured · mentions 1.4.8Citation fileNoWebsiteYes · pkgdown

Help pages: 17 (5 internal)includes a package overview page
Examples that run: 100%6 run in a plain check
Exported functions with examples: 38%
Documented parameters: 92%
Return-value docs: 13%
Help pages citing references: 0%

How these are measured

Downloads

12.3M

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #65 · ~33.6K/day · ~1M/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

800.1K30 days

2.8M90 days

12.3M1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on152.8K r2u129 autocran346.7K conda_forge5.4K c2d4u

How downloads are counted

Repository

r-lib/pkgbuild ↗Organization: r-lib

77Stars

43Forks

12Open issues

4Open PRs

21Releases

394Commits

30Commit identities

r

394 commits · Last activity 2026-10-05 · Default branch at 1.4.8.9000, ahead of CRAN 1.4.8 (checked 2026-10-21)

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): 90%
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues: 1
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs: 0

Forks over time

2026-07-09 · 402026-10-05 · 43

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

11 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 6 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/r-lib/pkgbuild on 2026-10-21.

Continuous integration (2)

GitHub ActionsR CMD check workflow

The R CMD check workflow runs on Linux, macOS and Windows, and on R-devel

Governance and community (1)

Code of conduct

Docs source (3)

pkgdown

GitHub Pages site last deployed 2026-10-05 · The repository has a site deploy workflow

pkgdown site last built 2025-05-27

Coverage (1)

Coverage reporting (Codecov)

Show all practicesHide 2 practices

CRAN release process (1)

cran-comments.md

Lint, format, editor (3)

AirVS CodeRStudio project

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v4 (2026-10-20)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

12 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing pkgbuild adds 7 packages (3 with compiled code, 1.3 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: cli 629 KB, processx 191 KB, ps 168 KB.

Depends (1)

R >= 3.5

Imports (5)

callr cli desc processx R6

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (7)

covr cpp11 knitr Rcpp rmarkdown testthat withr

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

19direct

681indirect

Imports 19

Suggested by 29

Show all 48 packagesHide all 48 packages

Depends, Imports or LinkingTo, most downloaded first

rstan pkgload devtools rcmdcheck pkgdepends rhub dockerfiler rextendr mkin packager vol2birdR DataPackageR climatehealth checkhelper PSPManalysis pracpac exams.mylearn readme2vignette compdb

Suggests, most downloaded first

How these are counted

Code & Tests

People & History

People (4)

Gábor Csárdi

Author, Maintainer since 1.2.1 (2021) · added in 1.2.1

Jim Hester

Author

Hadley Wickham

Author

Posit Software, PBC

Copyright holder, Funder · added in 1.4.1

Previously maintained by Jim Hester (1.0.0 to 1.2.0).

Listed in earlier versions (1)

RStudio

no longer listed · 1.0.0 to 1.4.0

Releases (23)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
1.4.8Latest
record
2025-05-26 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
1.4.7
record
2025-03-24 · diff ↗
1.4.6
record
2025-01-16 · diff ↗
1.4.5
record
2024-10-28 · diff ↗
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
1.4.4
record
2024-03-17 · diff ↗
1.4.3
record
2023-12-10 · diff ↗
1.4.2
record
2023-06-26 · diff ↗
1.4.1
record
2023-06-14 · diff ↗
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
1.4.0
record
2022-11-27 · diff ↗
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
1.3.1
record
2021-12-20 · diff ↗
1.3.0
record
2021-12-09 · diff ↗

Show 16 earlier eventsHide 16 earlier events

1.2.1
record
2021-11-30 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
with_latex, without_latex
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
1.2.0
record
2020-12-15 · diff ↗
1.1.0
record
2020-07-13 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
pkg_links_to_cpp11, rtools_needed
1.0.8
record
2020-05-07 · diff ↗
1.0.7
record
2020-04-25 · diff ↗
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24
1.0.6
record
2019-10-09 · diff ↗
1.0.5
record
2019-08-26 · diff ↗
1.0.4
record
2019-08-06 · diff ↗
R
R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
1.0.3
record
2019-03-21 · diff ↗
1.0.2
record
2018-10-16 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
needs_compile, pkg_links_to_rcpp
1.0.1
record
2018-09-18 · diff ↗ ·
added 1 export
local_build_tools
1.0.0
record
2018-06-27
R
R 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23

Package metadata

First published: 2018-06-27
Total releases: 23 / 8 yrs
License: MIT + file LICENSE OSI · relicensed from GPL-3 in 1.2.0
Minimum R: ≥ 3.5
Download size: 50 KB

Appears in task views

Package Development and Maintenance

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' preferred citation:

citation("pkgbuild")

Format

Csárdi, G., Posit Software, PBC, Hester, J., & Wickham, H. (2025). pkgbuild: Find Tools Needed to Build R Packages (Version 1.4.8) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.pkgbuild

This package has no citation file, so citation() returns this entry built from DESCRIPTION.

Cite the R Observatory

For a number measured here: a download total, a coverage figure, an archival date.

Format

APA

Balamuta, J. J. (2026). R Observatory: Metrics for pkgbuild version 1.4.8 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-25. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-25, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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