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 projoint and rapr — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
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.
rapr generalises its Rangeland Analysis Platform API access one endpoint at a time
rapr pulls Rangeland Analysis Platform data into R — vegetation cover and production rasters derived from Landsat and Sentinel-2, plus the tabular summary APIs. The 1.1.3 release replaces the single-purpose table function with a general get_rap_table() covering the cover, coverMeteorology, production and production16day endpoints. The package reached CRAN in 2025 and is maintained by brownag, who also maintains the GeoPackage interface gpkg.
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.
rapr pulls Rangeland Analysis Platform data into R — vegetation cover and production rasters derived from Landsat and Sentinel-2, plus the tabular summary APIs. The 1.1.3 release replaces the single-purpose table function with a general get_rap_table() covering the cover, coverMeteorology, production and production16day endpoints. The package reached CRAN in 2025 and is maintained by brownag, who also maintains the GeoPackage interface gpkg.
The shape is familiar for a young API client: add access to one endpoint, then generalise it once a second endpoint proves the pattern. get_rap_production16day_table() arrived in 1.1.0 and was deprecated three releases later in favour of a product argument. Between those, the work was error handling — empty geometries, server-side HTTP failures, warning timing — the unglamorous half of wrapping a remote service. The 1.0.0 release had already set the ambition by exposing both the 30m Landsat and 10m Sentinel-2 sources behind one argument.
Expect the remaining RAP endpoints to be folded into get_rap_table() as they are needed, and the deprecated 16-day function to be removed once the general interface has been out long enough.
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 projoint or rapr.
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 projoint alternatives → · See all rapr alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
Both compete on the same themes — r-package — within Infra & APIs. projoint is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 2.5 vs 0.0), with 0 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. projoint is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 2.5 vs 0.0), with 0 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 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.
Top rapr alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "rapr alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/rapr for the full list with editorial commentary on each.