gps2gtfs
gps2gtfs spent a release making its docs stop describing functions it does not have.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of dvir and glyvis — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
dvir keeps making disaster victim identification a single call instead of a workflow.
dvir handles disaster victim identification: matching unidentified remains against reference families using pedigree likelihoods. The package has consolidated around dviSolve(), a complete pipeline introduced in 3.2.1 and rewritten in 3.3.0 to use generalised likelihood ratios for families with several missing persons. Recent releases have been about making that pipeline survive large cases, adding dviGridSize() and a maxAssign cutoff to skip joint analysis when the combination count explodes, plus per-step timings.
glyvis keeps losing plot functions as the packages behind them get reorganized.
glyvis is the plotting layer for glycoverse results. Its recent releases are dominated by two forces it does not control: glyexp's container migration, which it absorbed in 0.7.0 by accepting SummarizedExperiment inputs, and glystats' function removals, which cost it first the WGCNA and consensus-clustering autoplot methods and then the entire enrichment plotting surface. Its own additions in the window are narrow, mostly label handling and NA robustness.
dvir handles disaster victim identification: matching unidentified remains against reference families using pedigree likelihoods. The package has consolidated around dviSolve(), a complete pipeline introduced in 3.2.1 and rewritten in 3.3.0 to use generalised likelihood ratios for families with several missing persons. Recent releases have been about making that pipeline survive large cases, adding dviGridSize() and a maxAssign cutoff to skip joint analysis when the combination count explodes, plus per-step timings.
The arc is from a toolbox of functions toward one supervised pipeline, with the older jointDVI() now emitting a legacy message. The current constraint is combinatorial: joint analysis over many victims and missing persons blows up, so the work has gone to measuring the blowup and bailing out of it. Parallelism is mid-migration, with the parallel and pbapply implementation removed and a mirai replacement stated as planned but not yet shipped, leaving numCores accepted and ignored with a warning.
The mirai-based parallelisation is announced as coming, so expect it next, most likely applied to the joint analysis step that maxAssign currently exists to avoid.
glyvis is the plotting layer for glycoverse results. Its recent releases are dominated by two forces it does not control: glyexp's container migration, which it absorbed in 0.7.0 by accepting SummarizedExperiment inputs, and glystats' function removals, which cost it first the WGCNA and consensus-clustering autoplot methods and then the entire enrichment plotting surface. Its own additions in the window are narrow, mostly label handling and NA robustness.
The package is being pruned from upstream rather than expanded from within. Every breaking change in the last four releases is a removal triggered by a sibling package dropping the function that produced the object being plotted. With enrichment now living in glyfun, the plotting for it has to be rebuilt somewhere, and glyvis is the obvious home.
Expect enrichment plotting to return once glyfun's result objects stabilize, since the visualizations were removed for want of an upstream producer rather than because users stopped needing them.
Other Analytics 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 dvir or glyvis.
gps2gtfs spent a release making its docs stop describing functions it does not have.
ducksemantics puts an ontology graph and ColBERT retrieval inside DuckDB, callable from R.
pedbuildr reconstructs pedigrees from DNA, and it just got much faster at the search.
forrel is getting faster at the simulations forensic kinship work actually spends its time on.
pedFamilias exists to read one legacy file format, and it has that job nearly finished.
pedmut turns awkward mutation models into ones the likelihood engine can actually handle.
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. dvir and glyvis 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.
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. dvir and glyvis 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 Analytics products to evaluate alongside.
Top dvir alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "dvir alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/dvir for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top glyvis alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "glyvis alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/glyvis for the full list with editorial commentary on each.