Search code examples
rgithubdevtools

What's a good strategy for saving old R package versions on GitHub?

The development of RStudio and the packages devtools and roxygen2 has made R package creation pretty easy. I use GitHub for version control and devtools allows others to easily install directly from my account.

As my package gradually changes with each version, I'm wondering if I should be maintaining .zip files (or other format) of my past stable builds, in case anyone would ever want to use a previous version.

It's easy to download a .zip of an R package directly from GitHub, but I'm wondering if I should add this to the same GitHub directory (e.g. https://github.com/myaccount/mypackage/previous_versions/mypackage_0.1.zip) without messing up somebody's installation via install_github("myaccount/mypackage").

So, the main Qs are:

  1. Should I keep an old package version at all?
  2. Should I keep old package versions in a sub-folder of my GitHub R package directory?
  3. Should I save .zip files downloaded from GitHub as my old version, or produce a Source or Binary file during the package build itself (i.e. in RStudio)?
  4. Is this a superfluous activity if one isn't yet willing to publish to CRAN?!
Solution

  • When you think your package is at a good solid place, you should tag a release. This archives the branch at that point in time and stores the zip file with the source code, and the tar.gz file.

    I tend to mark my CRAN packages as a release each time I release it to CRAN (for example, see https://github.com/nutterb/pixiedust/releases) and with some intemediary tags that I consider noteworthy.

    Another good strategy for managing changes in between tagged releases is to maintain a development branch below your main branch. That way your development changes won't pollute or break anything being used by those pulling from your main branch. It makes you free to experiment in the dev branch while always having a clean, working copy to push to and restore from.