Colin Gillespie and Jack Walton tackle a common training problem:
As the number of courses we offer increased, so did the maintenance burden of our associated training materials (lecture notes, slides, exercises, and more). To ease this burden, and to assist in ensuring that our training materials build consistently, we developed an R package called {jrNotes2}. Amongst other things, this package ensures that all courses:
– have identical “template files”:
.gitlab-ci.yml,.gitignore,Makefiles,index.Rmd, …;– have the same directory structure, and
– pass a set of quality-assurance checks.
This is smart but read on to see why it’s still a challenge. This is especially true in the R and Python worlds, where breaking changes seem to be so common.