wooldridge
A textbook data package whose whole job is to stay installable, and whose releases prove how much work that is.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of Depot and projoint — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
| Feature | Depot | projoint |
|---|---|---|
| Sector | Infra & APIs | Infra & APIs |
| Velocity score | 6.3 | 2.5 |
| Sparks · 30d | 1 | 0 |
| Top themes | ci-cd, build-acceleration, test-intelligence, git-hosting | conjoint-analysis, survey-research, qualtrics, cran |
| Last editorial update | 5d ago | 59m ago |
| Website | — | Visit → |
Depot keeps absorbing the CI stack — tests, networking, runners, now its own git host.
Depot has moved well past build caching. Test results reached general availability in July with org-wide flaky, slow, and recurring failure analytics plus timing-based shard splitting; Sherlock's AI analysis became available on any run rather than only failed ones; and CI jobs can join a Tailscale tailnet to reach private services. The runner fleet now defaults to macOS 26 on M4 hardware, Depot CI understands GitHub stacked pull requests, and Depot Code — a diskless git server backed by blob storage — entered private beta.
projoint spent a year on CRAN paperwork, then shipped a correctness fix it flagged itself.
projoint is an R package for analysing conjoint survey experiments, covering Qualtrics import, reshaping, and quantity-of-interest estimation with inter-rater reliability correction. Most of its release history is CRAN admission work — citation formats, DESCRIPTION fields, \value{} tags, vignette cleanups — with four tags backfilled within ninety seconds of each other on 15 July in non-monotonic version order, so neither tag order nor timestamps in this feed track the real sequence. The substantive releases are the ones fixing data-preparation bugs that silently corrupt estimates.
Depot has moved well past build caching. Test results reached general availability in July with org-wide flaky, slow, and recurring failure analytics plus timing-based shard splitting; Sherlock's AI analysis became available on any run rather than only failed ones; and CI jobs can join a Tailscale tailnet to reach private services. The runner fleet now defaults to macOS 26 on M4 hardware, Depot CI understands GitHub stacked pull requests, and Depot Code — a diskless git server backed by blob storage — entered private beta.
The pattern is absorbing each adjacent piece of the pipeline that Depot's position already gives it data about. It runs the builds, so it owns test timing, so it can balance shards; it runs the jobs, so it can diagnose them; it hosts the runners, so it can wire private networking into them. Depot Code extends the same logic upstream to source hosting, which would close the loop between repository and runner. A quieter parallel thread keeps moving SDK- and dashboard-only settings into the CLI, stated explicitly as making projects configurable by agents and scripts.
Depot Code widening past private beta and binding more tightly to CI is the move the rest of the window sets up. The test work is also positioned to go from reporting to selection — skipping tests a change cannot affect — since Depot now holds the timing and failure history that would require, though the entries stop short of saying so.
projoint is an R package for analysing conjoint survey experiments, covering Qualtrics import, reshaping, and quantity-of-interest estimation with inter-rater reliability correction. Most of its release history is CRAN admission work — citation formats, DESCRIPTION fields, \value{} tags, vignette cleanups — with four tags backfilled within ninety seconds of each other on 15 July in non-monotonic version order, so neither tag order nor timestamps in this feed track the real sequence. The substantive releases are the ones fixing data-preparation bugs that silently corrupt estimates.
The maintainer is hardening the path from raw Qualtrics export to estimate, which is where conjoint analysis quietly goes wrong. Three separate releases fix that path: dropped respondent-level weights in organize_data(), repeated-task reshaping in reshape_projoint(), and choice-to-profile mapping in 1.1.3. Each fix now arrives with regression tests and stricter validation rather than just a patch, and 1.1.3 adds an explicit .choice_map so the mapping is auditable instead of inferred.
Expect the validation-and-regression-test pattern to keep extending across the import path, with releases continuing to arrive in bursts around CRAN submission rather than on a cadence.
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 Depot or projoint.
A textbook data package whose whole job is to stay installable, and whose releases prove how much work that is.
A graph-centrality package that spent 2026 making its existing measures usable at scale, then went quiet.
A test-theory package that grew into a graphical-model toolkit, now spending its releases paying down the API debt that growth created.
nuggets keeps compounding on the 2.0 rewrite — more pattern families, lighter install.
eratosthenes spends 0.1.0 hardening inputs rather than adding chronology methods.
dqcheckr adds drift analysis, then removes the YAML a user had to hand-write.
See all Depot alternatives → · See all projoint alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Depot is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 2.5), with 1 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Depot is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 2.5), with 1 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Infra & APIs products to evaluate alongside.
Top Depot alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Depot alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/depot for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top projoint alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "projoint alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/projoint for the full list with editorial commentary on each.