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Comparison · Infra & APIs
crandep vs ggVennDiagram
A side-by-side editorial comparison of crandep and ggVennDiagram — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Shared themes:r-package
crandep vs ggVennDiagram: at a glance
What is crandep?
Half CRAN dependency scraper, half extreme-value modelling kit — and the scraper half keeps finding bugs.
crandep does two jobs that rarely share a package: it harvests the CRAN dependency network, and it fits power-law and extreme-value mixture models to the resulting degree distributions. The 2024 releases were all model work — profile posteriors, wrappers, a constrained variant, a TZP-power-law mixture between the two- and three-component models. The 2025 releases are entirely the other half, fixing what the harvester was silently getting wrong.
What is ggVennDiagram?
A Venn diagram package whose public release notes say almost nothing — including about its copyright cleanup.
ggVennDiagram draws Venn diagrams as ggplot2 objects. The visible release feed is thin and irregular: three entries between 2021 and 2024, two of which contain nothing but a pointer to NEWS. Only the most recent, V1.5, describes actual changes, and both of them are legal housekeeping rather than features.
crandep vs ggVennDiagram: editorial side-by-side
crandep
0.0INFRA · APIS
Half CRAN dependency scraper, half extreme-value modelling kit — and the scraper half keeps finding bugs.
◆ Current state
crandep does two jobs that rarely share a package: it harvests the CRAN dependency network, and it fits power-law and extreme-value mixture models to the resulting degree distributions. The 2024 releases were all model work — profile posteriors, wrappers, a constrained variant, a TZP-power-law mixture between the two- and three-component models. The 2025 releases are entirely the other half, fixing what the harvester was silently getting wrong.
◆ Where it's heading
The modelling side has settled into a family of mixtures with matching wrapper and profile-posterior functions, and has not gained a new component since mid-2024. Attention has shifted to data quality in the scraper, where two consecutive releases dealt with the same class of problem: rows that should not exist because of trailing commas in CRAN's own metadata, and rows that should exist but did not because orphan packages have no edges. For a package whose science is degree distributions, missing isolated nodes is a modelling error, not a formatting one.
◆ Prediction
Expect further hardening against CRAN metadata quirks in the harvesting functions; the mixture-model side looks feature-complete and is likely to stay quiet unless a new component model is published.
ggVennDiagram
0.0INFRA · APIS
A Venn diagram package whose public release notes say almost nothing — including about its copyright cleanup.
◆ Current state
ggVennDiagram draws Venn diagrams as ggplot2 objects. The visible release feed is thin and irregular: three entries between 2021 and 2024, two of which contain nothing but a pointer to NEWS. Only the most recent, V1.5, describes actual changes, and both of them are legal housekeeping rather than features.
◆ Where it's heading
What can be read here is not a feature direction but a tidying of provenance. V1.5 removed code copied from yulab.utils and made the package comply with the copyright terms of the venn package it draws on, with the yulab.utils maintainer appearing as a first-time contributor to do it. Everything else in the window defers to a changelog kept outside the feed, so the direction of the package itself is not readable from these entries.
◆ Prediction
No reliable prediction is available from this feed — the release notes are pointers rather than descriptions, and the visible entries skip whole version ranges.
Alternatives to crandep and ggVennDiagram
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 crandep or ggVennDiagram.
NGINX
nginx returns to feature work with PROXY v2 upstream writes, and quietly adds JSON to core.
ESPHome
ESPHome closes the 2026.8 cycle, but the release body is a bare link to the real notes.
vcfR
A genomics workhorse whose visible release feed stops dead in mid-2020.
dialr
The R phone-number package stopped only parsing numbers and started asking them where they are.
ordinalsimr
A Shiny app for choosing the right ordinal test reached CRAN in a single 90-minute burst of tags.
See all crandep alternatives → · See all ggVennDiagram alternatives →
Recent activity from crandep and ggVennDiagram
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1y agocrandepDependency harvest split in two so orphan packages stop disappearing
- 1y agocrandepTrailing commas in CRAN metadata no longer produce empty-name rows
- 2y agocrandepConstrained two-component mixture with continuity at the threshold
- 2y agocrandepArgument names normalised to x_max; MCMC wrapper defaults set
- 2y agocrandepTZP-power-law mixture fills the gap between the 2- and 3-component models
- 2y agoggVennDiagramCopied code removed and venn copyright terms satisfied
- 2y agoggVennDiagramCRAN release 1.4.9
- 2y agocrandepProfile posteriors and chained MCMC wrappers for the mixture models
- 5y agoggVennDiagramCRAN release v1.1.4
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between crandep and ggVennDiagram?
Both compete on the same themes — r-package — within Infra & APIs. crandep and ggVennDiagram 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 crandep better than ggVennDiagram?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. crandep and ggVennDiagram 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 crandep?
Top crandep alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "crandep alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/crandep for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to ggVennDiagram?
Top ggVennDiagram alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "ggVennDiagram alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/ggvenndiagram for the full list with editorial commentary on each.