Question on 2 choices made in installation guide

[bmkramer]

In going over the setup vignette in preparation for the WORCS workshop, I came across two points:

• Step 4 - Register on Github, step 2: Request a free academic upgrade to be able to create private repositories - currently, all users are able to create private repositories (with some limits on functionalities, but nothing that will affect anything described in the WORCS workflow as far as I am aware?) - see here and here)

I would suggest not to include this step in the installation guide for first users

• Step 6 - run worcs::git_user("your_name", "your_email", overwrite = TRUE)

What's the reason to force overwrite = TRUE rather than the default overwrite = FALSE to not overwrite existing Git credentials?

[cjvanlissa]

Dear Bianca, I will change Step 4 due to GitHub's changed policy.

Step 6 is necessary, otherwise they will not have a valid git user and all git-related functions will fail. Overwrite = FALSE just does nothing, it's to ensure that our package tests don't change people's git users all around the world.

[bmkramer]

Hi Caspar, thanks for your reply.

Re: step 6: sure, but if a user has already set their git credentials, why is there a need to overwrite them in this step? (sorry if I'm being dense here ;)

[cjvanlissa]

This is a tutorial for starting from scratch; as it says in the intro, if a user already has some of this software installed, they can skip those steps.

But given the fact that not having a git user was one of the most common problems in workshops pre-worcs, I don't think it's wise to remove this step.