Promoting link-y-ness in R packages: GitHub links

[jennybc]

I find it so helpful, once I fall down some rabbit hole, to find that my rabbit hole has been equipped with all the links I am likely to need.

Concrete Unconf project idea is something I tweeted:

Create a bot (or script?) that makes a PR to R pkgs that are developed on GitHub but lack said link(s) in DESCRIPTION.

There are lots of details to be worked out but I think this work would have immediate and lasting value. It also gives a great opportunity to work with the GitHub API (maybe via gh?), rOpenSci's git2r package, and the services offered by @gaborcsardi via METACRAN (specifically the API re: R packages and the GitHub read-only mirror of all CRAN packages).

[njtierney]

Sounds like fun!

[jennybc]

@HenrikBengtsson also replied with a related idea: that packages developed on GitHub should include a link back to their CRAN page, by default as the main URL for the repo or elsewhere in the README.

[hadley]

Linking back to CRAN seems mostly nicely done with a CRAN badge; I wonder if there's other badges that a bot could automatically suggest.

[maelle]

I didn't know there were two packages for badge creation:

• badgecreatr

• badger

There are badges with the version number for the devel/released version.

[hadley]

There's also https://www.r-pkg.org/services#badges

[karthik]

There are so many badge creation services but none are particularly satisfactory. Maybe we can have a brief discussion/hack session around improving existing packages (as PRs). @maelle badgecreatr is nice but it doesn't let you choose the badges or order them without so many line breaks. Grouping them in some logical way would be nice.

CI status: x, y, z
Versions: CRAN, GitHub
Stats: Coverage, Downloads

or something like that.

[njtierney]

This would be really cool to work on. The first time I created badges, I copypasta'd from other people's repos (which, btw, is such a nice feature of working on open source), but it would be nice to automate that, with some control, like @karthik suggested.

[maelle]

Specific issue for badges https://github.com/ropensci/unconf17/issues/58

[RMHogervorst]

@karthik I found that I used my own package badgecreatr mostly without the main function to dump all the badges at once and mostly used the separate badge-create-functions. I definitely welcome ideas, and PR's, to improve everyone's workflow.