Re:Generate Musical Accompaniment with R
by adeelk93 on Monday November 29, 2021 @12:12AM
(#29376637)
Breaking changes in packages is not exclusive to R, you’re right. But dependency issues kinda is?
Let’s say two competent analysts wrote some code 5 years ago and you need to reproduce it today, one in R and the other in Python. The Python code probably includes a `pip freeze` or some equivalent, but the author of the R code had no equivalent. There’s no good agreed upon solution. And I don’t think I could reasonably fault that R analyst.
Packrat seems to be falling out of favor, I should read more about conda with R.
(The way I’d solve this problem in R is with an MRAN snapshot from 5 years back in a Docker image, but that’s basically accepting I won’t be able to integrate it with more recently written R)
Many popular packages like data.table rarely break after years of version upgrades. But relying on that in any kind of programming language is asking for trouble...
We're using renv since about a year at our workplace and haven't had any major issues occur. Maybe try packrat? Or try conda with R. Otherwise using docker should eliminate most reproducibility issues