Development environment

[wlandau]

In the same way packages get checked before builds reach production, R-multiverse itself would benefit from a separate development environment. That way we can really field-test patches before rolling out major updates to multiverse.internals or continuous integration. I propose new development versions of the contribution, community, and production repos in https://github.com/r-multiverse/dev-contributions, https://github.com/r-multiverse/dev-community, and https://github.com/r-multiverse/dev-production, respectively. We won't need any fancy mirroring for the dashboards, but it would be great to keep using the r-multiverse org and to have dev-production behave just like production in terms of withholding builds when important checks fail (#70). @shikokuchuo, what do you think?

R-multiverse as a whole is still in its testing phase, so we won't need a separate dev environment for a while, but I think we will need it before we scale out.

[shikokuchuo]

This would be to test upgrades to the infrastructure before it is rolled out live (our only option at the moment). I think that's a good idea.

I would suggest creating a separate testing or 'dev' org so that r-multiverse does not become cluttered. Especially as we are asking contributors to come to the GitHub repo to make PRs.

We'd probably only need to maintain a small test set of packages, rather than mirroring the entire Multiverse?

[wlandau]

This would be to test upgrades to the infrastructure before it is rolled out live (our only option at the moment).

Yes, exactly!

I would suggest creating a separate testing or 'dev' org so that r-multiverse does not become cluttered. Especially as we are asking contributors to come to the GitHub repo to make PRs.

Good idea. Who knows what other repos we'll want to test there.

We'd probably only need to maintain a small test set of packages, rather than mirroring the entire Multiverse?

Yes, we'll only need a representative subset. Can't imagine we'd need more than the 9 in https://github.com/r-multiverse/multiverse.internals/blob/c2bf496e82a438ad022a5ea560b2623f5b5cad25/inst/mock/community/packages.json, all of which could be mock packages also hosted from the R-multiverse testing org.

[wlandau]

As always, the hardest part of this is figuring out a new name for the org. I like r-multiverse-dev because it clearly matches r-multiverse.

[wlandau]

Should I go ahead and create the org, or should we workshop the name first?

[shikokuchuo]

Feel free to go ahead. In my view the name we use isn't important as it's not public-facing.

[wlandau]

Feel free to go ahead.

Thanks!

In my view the name we use isn't important as it's not public-facing.

I agree it's not "public-facing" in the sense that we do not expect non-admins to notice or care. But for transparency purposes, and to connect it to R-universe, would it be okay to make it a publicly visible org?

[shikokuchuo]

Yes I don't mean make it a private repo. I'm just saying as a matter of fact it's not public-facing, hence I don't care about the name.