A couple of weeks ago, I saw on Dirk Eddelbuettel’s blog that R 3.4.0 was going to include a function for obtaining information about packages currently on CRAN, including basically everything in DESCRIPTION files. When R 3.4.0 was released, this was one of the things I was most immediately excited about exploring, because although I recently dabbled in scraping CRAN to try to get this kind of information, it was rather …