Persist drat repo across sessions

[rogerssam]

Hi Dirk,

Firstly thank you so much for your work on this package - I've started using it recently and it's fantastic!

I've been wondering what the best way is to assist novice users to persist a drat repo across R sessions though? I.e. at present the drat repo only survives in the session drat::addRepo() is run in, so restarting R essentially leaves orphaned packages again. My main motivation is to enable easy updates to "non-cran" packages.

It's a (relatively simple) matter of adding it to a user's .Rprofile file, but knowing what to add and where can be daunting for inexperienced users.

In the first instance, some more explicit instructions in the documentation/FAQ might be useful. I've also been wondering about writing a small helper function that would assist with this, so people don't have to know or care about it - it just does it for them. Perhaps even via an argument in the addRepo function similar to action in insertRepo(), though I'm torn if writing to people's .Rprofile files is a good idea?

What are your thoughts around this? Am I misunderstand intended behaviour? Would one or both be useful do you think? I am happy to provide a PR for either or both if you think it's a worthwhile enhancement.

[eddelbuettel]

I am also torn about editing / writing / altering ~/.Rprofile. Too much can go wrong for too little gain in my opinion.

That leaves us with two choices. Documenting the (after all somewhat trivial) one-line change in the FAQ, and/or mentioning other solutions for startup. For example for the last few years I have been using this (following some on-line discussions years ago with I no-longer-remember-whom, but I have shown this before)

    if (dir.exists("~/.R/profile.d")) {
        files <- list.files("~/.R/profile.d", pattern=".*\\.R$", full.names=TRUE)
        for (f in files) {
            source(f)
        }
    }

and now ~/.Rprofile remains unchanged and I just drop new files into ~/.Rprofile.d. Perfect also for e.g. having ~/.Rprofile in a repo and possibly public but keeping s3cr3t keys hidden in that that directory :)

There are now similar programmatic approach. @henrikbengtsson wrote startup which generalises the idea above. But adding another dependency just for the one-liner is not exactly the right approach for drat either.

All that said, the longer I think about this the more I think to not change drat at all. This really really is just a matter of local config just how you would add a BioConductor repo, say, or a company repo. Just do it.

[eddelbuettel]

This can be closed, the lack of following suggests the issue is addressed. If more is needed please reopen and ideally demonstrate with small reproducible examples why.