csgillespie/efficientR

Pause commits

Opened this issue · 1 comments

csgillespie commented

@Robinlovelace I think we should pause commits to this repo, for the following reasons:

  • This repo doesn't actually match the published version. Many of the typos aren't present in the published version due to the nice O'Reilly proof-reading

  • More importantly, the book needs to be revised. Making minor tweaks suggests that it's up to date.

Proposal:

  • Fix any remaining issues in the repo
  • Add a few headers explaining the issues above
  • Create a new page, highlighting parts that may be out-of-date. For example, I suspect chapter 6 is a little off now with R 4.0.0 and recent changes to dplyr.
Robinlovelace commented

Definitely think we should update the book. It's not that different from the published version, only a few minor typos / stylistic issues that will be easy to fix based on copies of the proofreading documents we were sent. More importantly, people in the community are already helping us to update it by flagging issues, so let's just go for a 'version 2'.

To decide what to do I think it's worth revisiting our motivations for writing the book in the first place and for me it was:

  • As a learning experience
  • To support students, collaborators and everyone with info that is hard to find to save time and effort
  • To provide a future-proof resource that can continue to evolve as the software evolves

For me the first two aims are met. There is nothing stopping me contributing to the third aim either. I agree with your suggestions, with the following comments:

  • Definitely agree we should fix the remaining issues and suggest triaging them with 'Important' and perhaps an addition 'Stops build' tags for each issue.
  • Yes, we should add something to the README, but my vision is that we will fix all major issues. We could just add Note: we are planning to update the book for updated packages and R 4.0.0 during spring and summer 2020. PRs and issues supporting our work very welcome. or similar.
  • Fully agree a page on what may be out of date will provide a good roadmap to the updates.

One to chat about on the phone I think. The current partial lockdown may be a good opportunity to get moving on this. Thanks for instigating this.