[R-pkg-devel] revdeprun: Rust CLI for automating revdep checks on cloud instances

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> Nan Xiao 
>>>>>     on Mon, 27 Oct 2025 23:07:59 -0400 writes:

    > Dear all,
    > I wanted to share a tool revdeprun that I built over the weekend. It might be useful if you maintain R packages with many reverse dependencies.

    > If you ever needed to run revdepcheck on a disposable cloud instance, you will know that the setup can be tedious. Install R, set environment variables, and handle other details before you can even start the actual checking. revdeprun automates all that. Once installed, you can run a full reverse dependency check with a single command:

    > revdeprun https://github.com/username/repo.git

    > It is written as a Rust CLI tool rather than an R package or a shell script, which makes it a bit easier to compile and run without setting up language runtime.

    > Blog post: https://nanx.me/blog/post/revdeprun/
    > GitHub: https://github.com/nanxstats/revdeprun

Thank you,  Nan, in the name of the R community.

As most of my packages are not with Microsoft, i.e., not on Github,
I'd be more interested in a version of your tool that works with
a simple source package tarball, i.e., the file  <pkg>_<version>.tar.gz 
resulting from  'R CMD build <pkgdir>'

In principle that should even be simpler than first getting the
package from the github repos, no?

Best regards,
Martin

--
Martin Maechler
ETH Zurich and R Core team