Import remake and remakeGenerator projects into drake

[wlandau-lilly]

Alternative to wlandau-lilly/drake#27.

[krlmlr]

Do you still plan to support importing remake projects in remakeGenerator? What is the best way to convert a remake project to drake?

[wlandau]

@krlmlr thanks for reminding me about this. I no longer plan to work on importing remake projects into remakeGenerator myself, but I will still review and accept pull requests. To convert a remake project to drake, things are trickier than just converting a remake.yml file into a remakeGenerator data frame. The depends field of remake.yml is not supported in drake, for example, so we may need to hack the commands to avoid dropping dependencies. Some other considerations:

• In drake commands, single-quoted strings denote file targets and double-quoted strings denote commands. So we would need to convert strings from remake commands that are not enclosed in I().
• The sources and packages fields of remake.yml are simpler. Just load the packages with library() and source() the files before running make(). The make() function also has packages and prework arguments.

I will let you know if I think of anything else.

[wlandau]

Now that I think of it, unless we do some fancy operations on the storr cache, users who convert their projects from remake to drake will need to rebuild all their targets anyway. So I am not likely to begin work on this anytime soon, especially because I am mainly preoccupied with ropensci/onboarding#156.

[krlmlr]

Thanks for the heads-up. I wouldn't mind rebuilding the targets after a conversion. Does drake have an equivalent for include ?

[wlandau]

I did not implement an equivalent of include in drake because I did not think there was a need. Drake relies on data frames directly rather than YAML files, so it is trivially easy to rbind() multiple workflow plans together. In fact, this is common practice, and the main examples rely on it.

[wlandau]

Glad to know you wouldn't mind rebuilding targets. The issue is much simpler without that part.