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by HanaShiratori
1668 days ago
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I think what you mention about breaking packages is not exclusive to R, that's just the result of community driven, open software development. You have to take care of reproducibility in any programming environment, but this doesn't have to do with the entire package eco system. Especially the tidyverse is very exclusive in that, since it is very fast paced and constantly evolving with breaking a lot of old code. Many popular packages like data.table rarely break after years of version upgrades. But relying on that in any kind of programming language is asking for trouble... We're using renv since about a year at our workplace and haven't had any major issues occur. Maybe try packrat? Or try conda with R. Otherwise using docker should eliminate most reproducibility issues |
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Let’s say two competent analysts wrote some code 5 years ago and you need to reproduce it today, one in R and the other in Python. The Python code probably includes a `pip freeze` or some equivalent, but the author of the R code had no equivalent. There’s no good agreed upon solution. And I don’t think I could reasonably fault that R analyst.
Packrat seems to be falling out of favor, I should read more about conda with R.
(The way I’d solve this problem in R is with an MRAN snapshot from 5 years back in a Docker image, but that’s basically accepting I won’t be able to integrate it with more recently written R)