Reproducible research and a repository of artifacts, a RFC

This article is originally published at https://random-remarks.net

This  work is still in progres. I think, however, it can already resonate with some people in the community. The communication I am hopeful for should lead to a better design and maybe getting valuable tools faster.

The main goal is to extend the base R’s history mechanism (see ?history) which currently gives access to past commands run in R. What if, however, we could browse not only the commands but also the objects (artifacts)? Hence, the repository of artifacts.

It is implemented by a number of packages. The two most important are: the repository which provides the basic logic of storing, processing and retrieving artifacts; and the ui which implements a basic, text-only user interface and hooks callbacks into R. The other packages are: storage, defer and utilities.

Here are the basic rules of how repository of artifacts works: the state of R session after each command is examined and all R objects and plots are recorded, together with the information about their origin (parent objects). Thus, the complete graph of origin of each artifact can be retrieved from the repository: the complete sequence of R commands and their byproduct artifacts. Further explanation can be found in the current motivation and plan for future work and examples of working with the repository are presented in this tutorial.

Questions I hope to explore with those interested are:

• since we all have different working styles, is this design a good fit for anyone besides me?
• how well does it work in actual data analysis? are the tools available already (on CRAN, GitHub, etc.) sufficient? if not, what are the gaps that need to be addressed?
•  would anyone be willing to share the recordings of their historical R sessions? even better, track some in the repository? (assumed that it does not disrupt your work)
• what are the gaps of the current design? how can it be improved or extended to make more sense?

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This article is originally published at https://random-remarks.net
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