Elementary presentation of differences between R sessions

Vincent J. Carey, stvjc at channing.harvard.edu

November 27, 2022

sessdiff – package/version differences between sessions

The sessioninfo package manages sessionInfo() outputs and facilitates programmatic analysis of R sessions.

The session_diff function provided there produces fairly elaborate reports. This package has a single function that extracts package and version information for packages present in one but not another session.

In our first example, we show how identical sessions are identified:

library(sessdiff)
si = sessioninfo::session_info()
sessdiff(si, si)

## $xonly
## character(0)
## 
## $yonly
## character(0)

In the second example, we show how loading a package affects the comparison.

requireNamespace("parody") # unlikely to be loaded

## Loading required namespace: parody

si2 = sessioninfo::session_info()
sessdiff(si, si2)

## $xonly
## character(0)
## 
## $yonly
## [1] "parody 1.57.0"

Further work

External resources like python configurations and numerical library versions can be obtained using sessioninfo functions. It will likely be useful to have simple reports on differences in these aspects of session configuration.