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Comparison · Infra & APIs
Cobbler vs ggfootball
A side-by-side editorial comparison of Cobbler and ggfootball — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Cobbler vs ggfootball: at a glance
What is Cobbler?
A backport branch kept alive for downstreams, with the main line nowhere in sight.
Every release in Cobbler's visible history describes itself the same way: backports from main to make Cobbler more stable for the community. The 3.3.x line has absorbed real work under that framing — collection indices, lazy loading, new XML-RPC endpoints — but none of it originates here. The most recent item is a 3.2.3 build carrying the CVE-2024-47533 fix to an older branch, with its Fixed and Added sections left as literal TBD placeholders.
What is ggfootball?
A football-viz package just swapped scraping for an API and broke its own output to do it.
ggfootball is a small R package for plotting expected-goals and shot data, sourced from Understat. Four releases are visible. The 0.2.x line was argument tidying and dependency pruning; 0.3.0 replaced the data-acquisition layer wholesale, moving get_match_shots() from HTML parsing onto Understat's AJAX endpoints and changing the returned column names in the process.
Cobbler vs ggfootball: editorial side-by-side
Cobbler
0.0INFRA · APIS
A backport branch kept alive for downstreams, with the main line nowhere in sight.
◆ Current state
Every release in Cobbler's visible history describes itself the same way: backports from main to make Cobbler more stable for the community. The 3.3.x line has absorbed real work under that framing — collection indices, lazy loading, new XML-RPC endpoints — but none of it originates here. The most recent item is a 3.2.3 build carrying the CVE-2024-47533 fix to an older branch, with its Fixed and Added sections left as literal TBD placeholders.
◆ Where it's heading
This is a stabilization branch serving downstream packagers rather than a product advancing on its own. The work that does land splits cleanly into three buckets: distribution coverage (Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, AlmaLinux, RHEL9, openSUSE and SLE signatures), API surface for integrators, and security backports. 3.3.3 flagged dump_vars as the replacement for get_blended_data as of 3.4.0 — a version that has not appeared in any release since.
◆ Prediction
Expect continued single-purpose backports to 3.3.x and older branches as CVEs surface; the entries give no indication of when or whether the 3.4.0 work these releases keep deferring to will ship.
ggfootball
0.0INFRA · APIS
A football-viz package just swapped scraping for an API and broke its own output to do it.
◆ Current state
ggfootball is a small R package for plotting expected-goals and shot data, sourced from Understat. Four releases are visible. The 0.2.x line was argument tidying and dependency pruning; 0.3.0 replaced the data-acquisition layer wholesale, moving get_match_shots() from HTML parsing onto Understat's AJAX endpoints and changing the returned column names in the process.
◆ Where it's heading
The direction is away from scraped HTML and toward a thinner, more defensible package: four dependencies dropped in 0.3.0 on top of qdapRegex in 0.2.1, input validation added, error messages rewritten. Both breaking changes so far were accepted rather than deferred, which reads as a maintainer treating pre-1.0 as the window to get the shape right. The package is willing to break callers for structural reasons, not cosmetic ones.
◆ Prediction
With the scraper rebuilt and the dependency surface trimmed, the next releases are likely to stabilise the new column names and extend the plotting side, which has seen nothing since 0.2.0. A 1.0 would be the signal that the data structure is now considered fixed.
Alternatives to Cobbler and ggfootball
Other Infra & APIs products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either Cobbler or ggfootball.
PINstimation
A market-microstructure toolkit that keeps adding estimators as the papers land.
nzilbb.vowels
A vowel-analysis package trimming dependencies after an email address got it archived.
emuR
The R half of the EMU speech database system, fixing what was quietly broken.
BAS
A Bayesian model-averaging package spending its 2.0 on memory, not methods.
tidyplots
tidyplots keeps rebuilding its own foundations rather than layering around them.
See all Cobbler alternatives → · See all ggfootball alternatives →
Recent activity from Cobbler and ggfootball
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1mo agoCobblerCobbler 3.2.3 backports the CVE-2024-47533 admin API fix
- 6mo agoggfootballggfootball 0.3.0 ⚡
- 6mo agoggfootballggfootball 0.2.2
- 1y agoggfootballggfootball 0.2.1
- 1y agoggfootballggfootball 0.2.0
- 1y agoCobblerCobbler 3.3.7 closes an admin-API authentication bypass
- 2y agoCobblerCobbler 3.3.6 adds EFI support to buildiso
- 2y agoCobblerCobbler 3.3.5 adds collection indices and lazy loading
- 2y agoCobblerCobbler 3.3.4 extends packaging to Ubuntu 22.04 and Debian 12
- 4y agoCobblerCobbler 3.3.3 adds resolved-value XML-RPC endpoints for Uyuni
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Cobbler and ggfootball?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Cobbler and ggfootball are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is Cobbler better than ggfootball?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Cobbler and ggfootball are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Infra & APIs products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to Cobbler?
Top Cobbler alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Cobbler alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/cobbler for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to ggfootball?
Top ggfootball alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "ggfootball alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/ggfootball for the full list with editorial commentary on each.