Data caching and updating

The pkgmatch package package relies on pre-generated inverse document term frequencies (IDFs). Inputs of text, code, or entire packages are converted into document frequencies, and the results compared with the pre-generated value to discern the best-matching result. The pre-generated IDFs are calculated for the entire package suites of both rOpenSci and CRAN.

Local caching and updating for users

The pre-generated IDFs are downloaded whenever needed in initial package calls. The download location is determined by the rappdirs package as fs::path(rappdirs::user_cache_dir(), "R", "pkgmatch)". Users should generally not need to worry about managing these data files themselves, although the data can be safely deleted at any time, as can the entire directory in which are stored.

The remote data are regularly updated, and so locally-cached data also require regular updating. By default, if any one of the locally-cached IDF files needed for functionality is more than 30 days old, a newer version will be automatically downloaded. This update frequency can also be over-ridden by setting a value like 100 days with: {r op, eval = FALSE} options ("pkgmatch.update_frequency" = 100L) If you want to ensure your data are always up to date, set an update frequency of 1, and they’ll be updated every day. Alternatively, you can set an enduring environment variable, typically in your ~/.Renviron file, to specify a fixed update frequency:

PKGMATCH_UPDATE_FREQUENCY=100

If you wish to prevent any updating, set that environment variable to a really high value, such as 1e6.

Data updating for developers

These package suites are constantly changing, and therefore the IDFs also need to be regularly updated. The “pkgmatch” package includes several files in the /R directory prefixed with “data-update” containing functions which implement this updating. These functions are intended to be used only by the developers. They are ultimately used in this GitHub workflow file which is automatically run every day to update all IDF data for both CRAN and rOpenSci. The IDF data thus always reflect the current daily state of both repositories.