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

[Nan Xiao]

Dear Martin,

Thank you for the kind words and the excellent suggestion. I'm pleased to share that tarball input support has been added in revdeprun 1.1.0 (among other improvements since the announcement). You can now run `revdeprun pkg_version.tar.gz` to check a tarball directly.

Best,
-Nan

On Thu, Oct 30, 2025, at 05:19, Martin Maechler wrote:
>>>>>> 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