anytime 0.3.13 on CRAN: Mostly Minor Bugfix

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 10:07:00 CDT

A maintenance release 0.3.13 of the anytime package arrived on CRAN today, sticking with the roughly yearly schedule we have now. Binaries for r2u have been built already. The package is fairly feature-complete, and code and functionality remain mature and stable.

anytime is a very focused package aiming to do just one thing really well: to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, … input format to either POSIXct (when called as anytime) or Date objects (when called as anydate) – and to do so without requiring a format string as well as accomodating different formats in one input vector. See the anytime page, the GitHub repo for a few examples, the nice pdf vignette, and the beautiful documentation site for all documentation.

This release was triggered by a bizarre bug seen on elementary os 8. For “reason” anytime was taking note on startup where it runs, and used a small and simply piece of code reading /etc/os-release when it exists. We assumed sane content, but this particular operating system and releases managed to have a duplicate entry throwing us spanner. So now this code is robust to duplicates, and no longer executed on each startup but “as needed” which is a net improvement. We also switched the vignette to being deployed by the new Rcpp::asis() driver.

The short list of changes follows.

Changes in anytime version 0.3.13 (2026-04-14)

Continuous integration has received minor updates

The vignette now use the Rcpp::asis() driver, and references have been refreshed

Stateful 'where are we running' detection is now more robust, and has been moved from running on each startup to a cached 'as needed' case

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report of changes relative to the previous release. The issue tracker tracker off the GitHub repo can be use for questions and comments. More information about the package is at the package page, the GitHub repo, in the vignette, and at the documentation site.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. You can also sponsor my Tour de Shore 2026 ride in support of the Maywood Fine Arts Center.