Get “first seen” dates for a symbol across GitHub + CRAN

Computes a small one-row summary of earliest known dates across:

• first commit in the repo (any file),

• first commit mentioning/introducing fname (per your get_first_commit() logic),

• first GitHub release/export date for fname (per get_first_export_github()),

• first CRAN release date for the package (via get_first_release()),

• first CRAN version that explicitly exports fname (via get_first_export_cran()).

Usage

get_first_all(user, repo, fname, cran_db = NULL, archive_df = NULL)

Arguments

user

Character scalar. GitHub owner/user (e.g. "tidyverse").

repo

Character scalar. GitHub repo name (and assumed CRAN package name).

fname

Character scalar. Symbol to look up (e.g. "pivot_longer").

cran_db

Optional data.frame returned by tools::CRAN_package_db(). If NULL, it is retrieved internally.

archive_df

Optional archive lookup data.frame with columns package and archive_date, typically from build_archive_df(). If NULL, it is retrieved internally.

Value

A one-row data.frame with columns:

first_repo

Earliest commit date in the repository (Date or NA).

first_commit

Earliest commit date returned by get_first_commit() for fname (Date or NA).

first_gh

Earliest GitHub export/release date for fname per get_first_export_github() (Date or NA).

first_release

Earliest CRAN release date for the package per get_first_release() (Date or NA).

first_cran

Earliest CRAN export date for fname per get_first_export_cran() (Date or NA).

Details

All returned values are Date scalars (or NA) and the function returns a one-row data.frame.

This function assumes the CRAN package name matches repo. If that’s not always true in your workflow, add a separate pkg argument and pass that to get_first_release() and get_first_export_cran().

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
get_first_all("tidyverse", "tidyr", "pivot_longer")
} # }