Change MRAN Snapshot Date

[dustindall]

The MRAN snapshot date has been interfering in my ability to install the latest packages. I'd like to be able to set the snapshot date in the configuration file. I created a simple fix by changing the snapshot date before each package is installed (see below).

Rscript -e 'args <- commandArgs(TRUE)' -e 'options(repos = c(CRAN = args[1]))' https://mran.revolutionanalytics.com/snapshot/YYYY-MM-DD -e 'install.packages(args[1], dependencies=TRUE)' devtools

There are other ways to go about this, but if you like my solution let me know and I'll send a pull request.

Thanks, Dustin

[paselem]

@dustindall This looks pretty interesting. How do you propose you will expose this in the config?

[dustindall]

I would call it mranSnapshotDate and place it with rPackages before or after cran.

[paselem]

Yes, I think it makes sense to expose the snapshot date as it's own parameter. We are thinking about how to solve this generically going forward, as it seems we may want to expose repo-specific properties for each repo we support.

One proposed suggestion that seems to resonate well is:

{
  cran: {
    packages: []
  },
  mran:{
    packages:[],
    snapshotDate: 'latest | YYYY-MM-DD'
  },
  github: {
    packages: [],
    authenticationToken: 'empty | MY_GITHUB_AUTHENTICATION_TOKEN',
  }
}

We are thinking to expose this as a new way to structure the config in the next few releases - probably after milestone 0.5.0.

[dustindall]

Looks good. Thanks.

[paselem]

@dustindall - With the latest release of 0.4.0 we support custom scripts which allows you to run custom code at cluster setup time. You can use it to manually install the MRAN Snapshots you need.

[dustindall]

Awesome, I'll test it out and report back.

Thanks

[paselem]

I am closing this issue out since we now support Open Source R (CRAN-R) and give you the ability to use CRAN directly OR bring your own version of Microsoft R Open with a version to match the snapshots you want.