why use renv for this project?

[maelle]

out of curiosity :slightly_smiling_face:

[ClaudioZandonella]

Hi @maelle,

I use renv more out of habit than for any other specific reason. I use renv in all my projects to track package dependencies. Also when developing packages I like having the possibility to control all the dependencies installed.

You are right that renv is not commonly used when developing R-packages. Actually, in this case, renv may also be harmful as testing the package functions should not depend on a specific environment.

To avoid this problem, I run all tests on GitHub actions without using renv. In this way, the latest package versions are used [or at least this is my understanding].

Do you see any other inconveniences of using renv when developing R-packages? Or do you suggest other workflows?

[maelle]

:wave: @ClaudioZandonella!

As an external contributor, I must say I first deactivated renv before contributing. :sweat_smile: I can't remember which package I wanted to use was missing, maybe it was devtools? So it was just easier for me to use my local library.

To install all the dependencies needed for a package project, I run pak::pak() which works well and is easy to remember.

If you keep using renv, as it is not common for package development maybe CONTRIBUTING.md should mention it?

[maelle]

Another comment on the project setup. For renv and other things there is an .Rprofile in this repository, which masks my user level .Rprofile (that I use for loading {reprex}, {devtools}, {gert}).

Would you consider adding

if (file.exists('~/.Rprofile')) {
  base::sys.source('~/.Rprofile', envir = environment())
}

to it so that both user-level and project-level Rprofiles are loaded? (a trick I got from https://bookdown.org/yihui/blogdown/global-options.html)