Using the 'available.packages' Function to Retrieve Emails

Question

Hello,

I am attempting to retrieve email addresses of contributing package authors and maintainers to the R-Project. The function reads as follows:

availpkgs <- available.packages(contriburl = contrib.url(getOption("repos"), type), method, fields = NULL, type = getOption("pkgType"), filters = NULL)

I've attempted different character values in the "fields" parameter to retrieve Maintainer and Author info from the 'PACKAGES' files, but have not been had luck. Does anyone know how I might approach this? Thank you in advance for your time.

Answer 1

I do not think the Author information is in what available.packages() retrieves:

R> AP <- available.packages()
R> colnames(AP)
 [1] "Package"    "Version"    "Priority"  
 [4] "Bundle"     "Contains"   "Depends"   
 [7] "Imports"    "LinkingTo"  "Suggests"  
[10] "Enhances"   "OS_type"    "License"   
[13] "File"       "Repository"
R> 

So maybe you need to combine this with a per-package lookup of the DESCRIPTION info at CRAN (or a mirror). I do that, and a few more things, in the 200-line script driving the CRANberries RSS feed / html summary of package updates at CRAN which stores stateful info in SQLite. For this, I retrieve Author, Maintainer etc directly from the package I am currently looking at rather than in one big global scoop. That said, there may of course be other meta-data at CRAN for this...