Is it possible to override transitive dependencies?
Show HN: Rv, a Package Manager for R
21–30 of 32 posts
Re: Show HN: Rv, a Package Manager for R
#22Is it possible to override transitive dependencies?
Yes, if you list it in the rproject.toml from a specific repo/url/git etc it will use that
Re: Show HN: Rv, a Package Manager for R
#23I'm curious — does rv support or plan to support per-project isolation of system-level dependencies (e.g., gfortran, libxml2, etc.) like what renv sometimes indirectly requires users to manage outside R? If not, do you have recommendations for managing these in a reproducible way alongside rv?
Re: Show HN: Rv, a Package Manager for R
#24I'm curious — does rv support or plan to support per-project isolation of system-level dependencies (e.g., gfortran, libxml2, etc.) like what renv sometimes indirectly requires users to manage outside R? If not, do you have recommendations for managing these in a reproducible way alongside rv?
I'm curious how your team ended up doing this. We settled on Nix with flakes after some pain with Docker / RStudio Server.
Re: Show HN: Rv, a Package Manager for R
#25Can this be used to effectively create R environments? I’m desperate for such a solution.
{renv} is pretty solid, I've been using it in production for years now and have no complaints.
Re: Show HN: Rv, a Package Manager for R
#26I'm curious — does rv support or plan to support per-project isolation of system-level dependencies (e.g., gfortran, libxml2, etc.) like what renv sometimes indirectly requires users to manage outside R? If not, do you have recommendations for managing these in a reproducible way alongside rv?
It's not planned for rv, this is whole other can of worms. Something like nix/docker should work but I'm not working on that part myself so I can't comment.
Re: Show HN: Rv, a Package Manager for R
#27You might want to consider writing a plugin for R with Mise en Place https://mise.jdx.dev/core-tools.html This would extend your reach and might take some of the heavy lifting out of the project. (At least for the runtime portion. I don't think it will help with package management.)
I could be wrong but I feel like the overlap between mise and R users is likely very tiny
Mise is pretty new, and it's userbase is tiny (afaik), so the overlap with it and anything is tiny. But I've enjoyed it as a replacement for ruby/node/java/python version managers, and I think it's a solid, thoughtful piece of kit. I think it targets curious, multilingual hackers who I imagine would be the kind of people to try out R to "kick the tires" just for fun (I imagine Elixer, Erlang, and Zig are in there for the same reason...surprised not to see Julia). It's also the case that mise is already doing all the heavy lifting of documentation, website, installation, etc so might as well not reinvent the wheel (such projects always have far more scope than you think, in my experience!) It could free you to making the package manager that much better (a very hard problem in itself).
I'm not affiliated, btw, just a happy user. Shout out to DHH for introducing it (to me) as part of Omakub.
Re: Show HN: Rv, a Package Manager for R
#28Very cool! Are you planning for there to be a corresponding R package that exposes the high level commands? The popularity of the usethis package really showed the power of keeping people within the R interpreter rather than going back and forth with the terminal. This is so important for a language like R that has so many users without much CS training
Re: Show HN: Rv, a Package Manager for R
#29Very cool! Are you planning for there to be a corresponding R package that exposes the high level commands? The popularity of the usethis package really showed the power of keeping people within the R interpreter rather than going back and forth with the terminal. This is so important for a language like R that has so many users without much CS training
Yes! Absolutely in the plans to have a corresponding R package. In the meantime, we've created a `.rv` R environment within rv projects that allow users to call things like `.rv$sync()` and `.rv$add("pkg")` from the console. Our internal user bases is primarily not CS based and have found these functions extremely helpful
Re: Show HN: Rv, a Package Manager for R
#30Ok, this is really promising. I've always found renv to be slightly frustrating to use and it ends up breaking in mysterious ways after a time. rv was a joy to use in a small personal repo.