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Proposal: synergising with `rworkflows`
Dear usethis
team,
Thanks for continuing to maintain and upgrade this incredible suite of tools! I wanted to reach out and make you aware that our team has developed a GitHub Action called rworkflows
:
https://github.com/neurogenomics/rworkflows
rworkflows
is a suite of tools (a template, an R package, and a GHA action) that aims to simplify the setup and maintenance of R developer-oriented GHA workflows, while also providing easy-to-change parameters without the user every having the touch the yaml scripts (which some users may find intimidating). For more details, you can read about rworkflows
in our preprint.
While there's some overlap with usethis
's GHA functionality, there's a couple of key differences:
- We use a single short workflow script to call the
rworkflows
action (see example here). - Once added (via
rworkflows::use_workflow
) users never have to update their yaml script, because any changes/fixes to therworkflows
action will automatically be propagated to call users. - The entire
rworkflows
action is version controlled using release tags. -
rworkflows
has some additional features like building Docker containers and deploying them to Dockerhub. - For a more detailed comparison of
rworkflows
,usethis
, andbiocthis
you can check out our step-by-step tutorial.
I'm reaching out to your team to see if you would be interested in synergising our efforts to provide easy-to-use CI tools for R package development. Some potential avenues might include:
- Adding an option to the relevant
usethis::use_github_action*
functions to call therworkflows
action. If interested, I'd be happy to make a PR tousethis
to help implement this. - Making
rworkflows
an official standard for R package development, which would ideally come with long-term support to help maintain and improverworkflows
(currently this is being led by our lab at Imperial College London). I realize these are non-trivial things to ask, so I'm just proposing them here as topics of further discussion (if interested).
Feel free to either reply here or reach out to our team via email. If interested, I'd be more than happy to arrange a call with the relevant parties (possibly @jennybc @hadley @wch @jimhester ?): Brian M. Schilder: brian_schilder [at] alumni.brown.edu | @bschilder Alan E Murphy: alanmurph94 [at] hotmail.com | @Al-Murphy Nathan G Skene: n.skene [at] imperial.ac.uk | @NathanSkene
Thanks again for all your remarkable efforts!, Brian