x13org / user-2016

Extending CRAN Packages with Binaries: The Example of x13binary

Extending CRAN Packages with Binaries:
The Example of x13binary

useR! 2016 at Stanford, CA

Dirk Eddelbuettel and Christoph Sax

The slides can be downloaded from here.

Abstract

The x13binary package provides pre-built binaries of X-13ARIMA-SEATS, the seasonal adjustment software by the U.S. Census Bureau. X-13 is a well-established tool for de-seasonalization of timeseries, and used by statistical offices around the world.

Other packages such as seasonal can now rely on x13binary without requiring any intervention by the user. Together, these packages bring a very featureful and expressive interface for working with seasonal data to the R environment. Thanks to x13binary, installing seasonal is now as easy as any other CRAN package as it no longer requires a manual download and setup of the corresponding binary.

Like the Rblpapi package, x13binary provides interesting new ways in deploying binary software to aid CRAN: A GitHub repository provides the underlying binary in a per-operating system form (see the x13prebuilt repository). The actual CRAN package then uses this repo to download and install the binaries once per installation or upgrade.

This talk will detail our approach, summarize our experience in providing binaries via CRAN and GitHub, and discuss possible future directions.