Maëlle's R blog

Once again a post praising XML. 😇 These are notes from a quite particular use case: what if you want to replace the usage of a function with another one in many scripts, without manual edits and without touching lines that do not contain a call to replace? The real life example that inspired this post is the replacement of all calls to expect_that(..., equals(...)), like expect_that(a, equals(1)), in igraph tests with expect_equal().

I recently re-read Nadia Eghbal’s Working in public. This time around, I noticed her mention of the book “Producing open source software” by Karl Fogel. It is a book about the people aspects of open-source projects, including money, and it reads like a sort of guide. Complying with my first-edition-curse, I did not notice there was a second edition online and soonish to be in print apparently, so I bought and read a second-hand first edition.

This post was featured on the R Weekly highlights podcast hosted by Eric Nantz and Mike Thomas. Do you ever see GitHub issue comments where someone posts the results of a reprex with a current package version, and then with an older one, to prove a regression? How would you go about preparing such a report? Today I learnt there is a clean way to have different versions of a codebase at once on your computer, thanks to the ever powerful Git.

As mentioned about a million times on this blog, last year I read Git in practice by Mike McQuaid and it changed my life – not only giving me bragging rights about the reading itself. 😅 I decided to give Pro Git by Scott Chacon a go too. It is listed in the resources section of the excellent “Happy Git with R” by Jenny Bryan, Jim Hester and others. For unclear reasons I bought the first edition instead of the second one.

I got more confident with Git since reading Git in practice. This has resulted in a more enjoyable Git practice! I’m also more keen to sharing Git “tips” with others, but felt it was challenging to quickly come up with examples to demo some Git workflows. This is what motivated my creating saperlipopette, an R package containing small Git playgrounds to practice various Git commands and strategies! What is saperlipopette? The saperlipopette package creates Git messes, or playgrounds, that users need to solve.