Dependencies file: how do we define what packages are required

colinpmillar commented 6 years ago

Summary

This could be done simply via a list of packages and versions, much like in a package DESCRIPTION file.

It would be nice to also specify github tag or commit sha for github packages.

Note that devtools, package has a bunch of code we could reuse to do much of what we need.

Tasks required

[x] Decide on a format to use - json, plain text

Links to other issues?

colinpmillar commented 6 years ago

Perhaps perhaps - a bibtex entry is also possible for software...

For software with a manual, R for example, is recommended to be cited as:

@Manual{,
  title = {R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing},
  author = {{R Core Team}},
  organization = {R Foundation for Statistical Computing},
  address = {Vienna, Austria},
  year = {2018},
  url = {https://www.R-project.org/},
}

And software with no published manual:

@Misc{popinet00,
author =   {Stephane Popinet},
title =    {{GTS}: {GNU} {Triangulated} {Surface} library},
howpublished = {http://gts.sourceforge.net/},
year = {2000--2004}
}

I think its worth investigating this idea a bit more,

we can use this info to download R packages.
It would provide a way ro automatically create a reference list of software used.
the format would be the same as the datasets

as with the citations file we might call the dependencies file:

dependencies.bib

colinpmillar commented 6 years ago

We would have to extend the R citation to include the howpublished and potentially doi field:

see: https://github.com/ices-taf/doc/issues/239#issuecomment-428198731 for some definitions of howpublised, doi

colinpmillar commented 6 years ago

Closing this and moving to implementation: Dependencies file: write an R function to download and install dependencies #244

ices-taf / doc