Support using both DESCRIPTION and environment.yml at the same time

[nstrelow]

I would like to be able to have an R-package repository with a DESCRIPTION file and environment.yml and have both listed dependencies installed.

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[betatim]

In what kind of situations do you end up wanting to do this?

[nstrelow]

I already have a package which uses DESCRIPTION. But when using it with Binder I want to have additional dependencies installed I only need in Binder.

e.g. jupyterlab-git or something like jupytext+r-rmarkdown to read Rmarkdown files as notebook.

Or would you say, that those should also go into the DESCRIPTION (not sure about python packages) or just install everything in postBuild?

postBuild is probably the way I will go for now (e.g. install the 2nd environment.yml), but this could make for a neat feature.

Ideas below

Something similar would be the dependecies vs dev_dependencies in npm or dart. I would like to be able to define binder only dependencies, which do not make sense in a context without binder.

One approach would be to check for dependency files in binder/ and root.

├── binder
│   ├── environment.yml <- My Binder specific dependencies (e.g. jupyter-git)
│   └── postBuild
├── environment.yml <- My normal dependencies (could also be DESCRIPTION or requirements.txt)
└── notebook.ipynb

My background: I am working a platform to conduct health intervention studies. (as part of my Master thesis). For the analysis of data, I want to provide the researchers with ways to easily work with Jupyter Lab (or RStudio). Binder would be perfect both for study conducting researchers and other researchers going through their results and findings (reproducibility).

Therefore dividing having 2 dependencies:

• Dependencies I as the platform developer manage (like jupyterlab-git)
• Additional dependencies the researcher wants to use

I will be looking into this tipp: Having a Binder Repo with just the default dependencies and pulling in the content later. But then I will also have to install researcher deps later on.

[manics]

This is related to the underlying build tool, so I'm transferring it to repo2docker

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