Explore possibility for integration with or leveraging of ProjectTemplate

[jonmcalder]

ProjectTemplate is fairly well established. Obviously it takes things much further in terms of enforcing templates, project structure etc, so I suppose one could view createAnalysisProject() as a more lightweight alternative to it.

Nevertheless, given that it has a fair amount of traction, I figure it's worth considering how we want to approach this functional overlap. Any thoughts on this?

[stephlocke]

Certainly seems to be a fair whack of overlap. pRojects works on an R package structure and is more in keeping with an Rstudio workflow which methodologically I find preferable. ProjectTemplate doesn't work the way I want to work but it's still a valid way to work.

I wonder if we could provide a function that wraps/calls out to ProjectTemplate and allow people to use it as a project type they could setup through pRojects?

[maelle]

I wonder if we could provide a function that wraps/calls out to ProjectTemplate and allow people to use it as a project type they could setup through pRojects?

why? why not instead have an example of createAnalysisProject with dirs chosen to mimick what ProjectTemplate does (well just the dirs)?

[maelle]

I'm tempted to close this. Both packages have very different philosophies.

From a rather quick glance at ProjectTemplates docs here's what I think:

• it loads packages automatically. One can get that in a pRoject project by listing dependencies under Depends, and for that, one can run usethis::use_package() since pRojects uses the package structure.

• there seems to be a lot of work around caching. I think we'll solve this here via Facilitate use of drake? #39

Anything I've missed? Any reason not to close this?

[maelle]

Poke @jonmcalder (do you use ProjectTemplate by the way?)

[jonmcalder]

No I don't use it - it just came to mind when I first saw pRojects since I had briefly looked into ProjectTemplate after hearing Hillary Parker refer to it (I think in one of the early episodes of NSSD). She also blogged about it a number of years ago - https://hilaryparker.com/2012/08/25/love-for-projecttemplate/

I agree that the philosophies are somewhat different and that's understandable since it seems ProjectTemplate originated long before the emergence of packages like usethis & drake.

Happy for you to close this.