End Phase 2

Part 1 - Saranjeet

Parts that Saranjeet has worked on during GSoD

• New translations chapter: Michael Chirico made a first draft, Saranjeet contributed to discussion and revision
  • Help to meet one of our GSoD targets, to have (two) people from outside the GSoD team contributing to the guide.
• Initial draft of chapter on tests for R: this has been reviewed.
• New landing page with R logo.
• New introduction section that gives overview of ways people can contribute to the R project and summary of chapters in the guide
• New section on navigating Bugzilla - based on feedback from Collaboration Campfires
• Miscellaneous improvements
  • Using properly gated code chunks
  • Incorporating more content within the guide rather than expecting readers to jump back and forth to/from external links

Saranjeet still has ~60 hours left to work, which she plans to do in December/January.

ACTIONS

• Finish the documentation PR: separate out outstanding issues as the review became very complicated so hard to address all at once.
• Then go back to work on testing chapter.
• Could potentially work on completing translations chapter, documenting how to contribute to translations. It now makes more sense to document how to contribute using Weblate server, but Saranjeet is not familiar with this, so it may not be possible within the remaining time.

Part 2 - Lluís

Parts that Lluís has worked on during GSoD

• Instructions on installing from source on Linux
  • Had helpful input recently regarding the necessary set up on Fedora. The corresponding instructions are ready to merge in.
• Instructions on installing from source on Windows
  • These instructions are also ready to merge in
• New section on git workflow just drafted
  • Incorporated standard SVN workflow as on https://www.r-project.org/bugs.html#how-to-submit-patches
  • Focused on using GitHub SVN mirror for testing on multiple operating systems and creating a patch.
  • Linked to some git cheatsheets
• Did not make progress on installation instructions for macOS as does not have direct access to a Mac and it is complicated by the different architectures etc.

Discussion

Installing R

• Can we avoid explicitly listing dependencies for Ubuntu and Fedora? Are they installed anyway when you install e.g. r-base-dev? At least give the command used to obtain the list rather than copying the output into the guide as this may be hard to maintain (and is also quite verbose!)
• Could use make check-all vs make check-devel and make check recommended - this is convenient but will take a long time to run, so perhaps not best to recommend.
• At the R Contribution Working Group, we discussed creating a Linux container that could be used on Windows/macOS to build R, as an alternative to building R natively. While this is interesting to pursue, there can still be a need for contributors to be able to build on different systems, for platform-specific bug-fixing/development. So it would still be nice to have macOS instructions.

SVN/Git Workflow

• Before making edits locally, should check that the checks pass, at least run make check-devel (or whatever checks you plan to run after making changes).
• Are there more resources we can point to, to avoid duplicating documentation on how to create a PR etc? Maybe Happy Git with R.

Lluís has to stop work at the end of November, so will do his best to tidy things up by then, but there may be a few things to resolve.

There will still be some budget left on his side, which could potentially be redirected to someone who could work on instructions for macOS.