cwbtools v0.3.1 ‘Straight No Chaser’ Released

A new version of cwbtools (v0.3.1) is available at CRAN.

The single change I want to highlight here is that the polmineR package is not a (weak) dependency of cwbtools any more. The initial thrust for that was to contain negative effects if polmineR can not be built for a platform. Issues are more tricky to handle as long as polmineR depends on cwbtools and cwbtools depends (though weakly) on polmineR.

We now have a clarified struture that - within the PolMine family of packages - polmineR depends on cwbtools and cwbtools depends on RcppCWB. That’s it, straight no chaser. And this explains the naming of the new release.

Avoiding the polmineR dependency required replacing usage of some high-level polmineR functions by lower-level functionality of the RcppCWB package. Functions and unit tests have been re-written accordingly. There is no change visible for the user. The only visible changes concern some minor improvements of the user dialogues, see the cwbtools changelog if you are interested in the details.

Looking into the future, cwbtools v0.3.1 prepares an upcoming release of the GermaParl package. This package will offer download functionality to install GermaParl from Zenodo (an open science data repository used for depositing PolMine corpora), and it includes a small subset of GermaParl for testing purposes. While the download functionality is not strictly necessary (it is just a thin wrapper for cwbtools::corpus_install()), the sample data within the package shall be very useful to make polmineR a leaner package that can rely on the GermaParl package for sample data.

The structure of dependencies we aim at will then be: polmineR depends on GermaParl and cwbtools, GermaParl depends on cwbtools, and cwbtools (as well as polmineR) depends on RcppCWB. So this will be a structure without any circularity. The current cwbtools release v0.3.1 “Straight No Chaser” has prepared exactly that.