adding preliminary renv stuff

[bsweger]

Love a good virtual environment--thanks!

[elray1]

Is the idea that this virtual environment will be used by package developers? Is it standard practice to ship dev environments as part of packages? What are best practices for sharing environments?

The above are real questions, and I am not an renv user (and maybe should be?) -- but I'm asking because I haven't seen this idea of adding renv setups to package repositories before. It feels like something I might more imagine adding to a repository that is doing some analysis. The same thing applies to python package development, e.g. I would think that a repository with some code using numpyro might specify how to set up an environment with the right version of numpyro, but the numpyro package itself I wouldn't imagine (?) would "come with" an environment. And a package using a specific version of another package would specify that kind of dependency in its DESCRIPTION or setup file.

But again, I'm not an expert on use of environments in developing packages, the above were real questions about what the right workflow is.

[nickreich]

Per conversation with @bsweger we are thinking that we should add all the renv stuff to .Rbuildignore and .gitignore so people can use these on their own, but the feeling is that renv should not be forced upon folks for this project.

[bsweger]

For posterity, here's the internal Slack thread where some of us talked about this (and apologies to @annakrystalli for not respecting the "have all convos on github" philosophy: https://reichlab.slack.com/archives/C01AN0JE46R/p1705589000904249

[bsweger]

Closing this as part of some cleanup!