I decided to research dependency management in R for something simple and light that could provide a foolproof end user experience i.e. ‘a button’ or a one-liner could be run once the repo had been cloned to set up an environment with the exact same package versions I had used in development. This was somewhat of a relief, but my eyes were now fully opened to what can happen when dependencies are not stated in explicit enough detail. My colleague is new to R, and I cringed and fretted for his user experience as the code basically blew up on the launchpad, spewing alien error messages the likes of which I had never seen.Īs I dug into his sessionInfo() it turned out he had installed Microsoft R Open, which runs an R version and CRAN package versions that are quite behind the current releases. Well let me tell you it was a catastrophic failure. The code was only weeks old, had maybe 40 recursive dependencies and used only CRAN versions… what could possibly go wrong right?
A couple of weeks ago I proudly shared a drake pipeline with a colleague along with some basic instructions: “Install R -> clone this repo -> install these packages -> run this file”.
